El Tono and Nuria have just released "Bar Tom Cruise" , I wanted to know a bit more about this new book and asked El Tono a few questions...

 

Why such a "scientologist" title?

It's not exactly a title, we didn't choose it, it's the picture we choose that said “here you are the title!”

We chose this picture because it represents a really great moment we had during our first travel to Brazil in 2004. We were traveling by bus to Porto Seguro when we saw from the window this old destroyed bar.

We thought it was a nice place to paint but when we had read its name, we just stop thinking and got off the bus with our entire luggage to go and paint it!

More seriously -i haven't checked the book yet-.

Is it a full photographic book -a selection of sexy pictures- without any text?

There is no text, the Rojo books works that way, it's only visual.

This book concept is perfect for us because it works like when you find our paintings in the street, there is no explanation, just look at it and make your own interpretations.

But we don't show only paintings in the book, it's like a part of our universe, our travels, our influences... Each photograph make big sense for us, you just have to find it…

What has been the harder on the making of the book?

The harder was to rule out the pictures and then to try to create links between them.

It was also hard to stop including new pictures, as long as we were making the book we made projects and travels and every time we wanted to include more pictures!

I think we are lucky that David from Rojo didn't kill us!

Are you satisfied of the finished product?

Yep! Definitely! It's small and really cute; a big part of our actual life is in there, it's a strange feeling…

Last months you experienced many new techniques & ideas: 3d pieces, sound graffitis and you participated in many gallery exhibitions. Is this book a way to end the chapter of "tuning fork" street painting? And do you think being a thirty something is compatible with street-art-activism?

No! Street painting is our main activity! But we like to reflect about the street communication and to reinterpret it. The tuning fork and the key are made for the streets, when we work for an “inside” project, we use our street experience to find concepts that allows an “inside-outside” exchange.

Thirty something? Years allow you to do more mature and reflected street activism, I think that when you get older, you think more about how, why and where to do your things.

With La Nuria, Nano4814 and Sixe you created the Equipo Plastico. What are your projects with this team?

To go BIG and have a lot of fun!!!

The idea to create the Equipo Plastico came after several events where we painted all together. We had so much fun that we decided to create the crew to keep working together.

 

Anything to add ?

Very big special thanks to David from Rojo.

The book is available here: http://www.rojo-magazine.com/shop

 

Click on the pictures to enlarge them