Michele Servadio was born in Italy in 1986. He grew up in a small village in the Veneto countryside. Drawn to painting and drawing from an early age, Servadio attended the Art School in Padua and the University of Visual Arts in Venice. In 2007 he approached the world of tattoos, fascinated by its tradition and cultural phenomenon. He moved to London in 2010.

In his atelier in Hackney Wick, Servadio creates new projects which interconnect the different practices of tattooing, painting, printmaking, photography, and performance art. Merging these diciplines, feeding them back into one another, he creates a unique universe where he is able to explore and describe the human condition and his environment.

The aesthetics of his work is dark and melancholic; it embodies Folklore, expressionism, and the bleakness of a post-industrial scenario.

In 2014 he started to experiment with sound and tattooing. This gave birth to 'Body of Reverbs', a contemporary Ritual combining sound, pain, accupuncture and permanent marks on the body. Body of Reverbs has been presented in the form of live performances and instilations across the UK, Europe, Asia and America.

Rucowas born in Rome in 1991 and he has been drawing since he can remember. During high school, he began to take an interest in the world of tattooing and approached thisjob as soon as he finished school. Ruco began tattooing in 2012 in Florence, while studying Art Printing Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts and he began receiving invitations as a guest in several studios around the world: Mexico, Israel, Honk Hong... His figurative style is the result of numerous influences from the most different fields. The main thread is related to the taste for the grotesque. Passionate about masks, he made them a source of research, producing them by hand. In addition to his own tattoo studio in the heart of Rome, Ruco pursues his other passions in a small private studio where he finds his space to create masks and costumes, model clay, paint, and so on. In 2018 Ruco brought out the research project related to the theme of the tattoo ritual "STILLIFE BRÜCKE" in collaboration with Servadio: 4-handed sessions in which the surrounding environment becomes the subject of the tattoo, whether it is a predefined and static composition or a changing and dynamic situation. In this way, the subject is not previously decided nor born from the imagination of the artists but represents what you have in front of your eyes during the ritual.

“Tattooing has been at the center of my activity for many years now and looking back at it, it seems that I have always tried to link it with other activities. I am not sure if it’s a necessity to celebrate tattooing as art, which is a topic I am not interested in, but there has always been a feeling of missing something while tattooing people, transforming them, and then just letting them go. 

I have started to perceive my clients like the characters in my paintings, but instead of portraying them with paint, I use photography. I add elements to it, I change the perspective, and I create new artwork.

The question is how to include tattooing in the bigger picture of art creation. How do I bond tattooing with the rest of my art? 

It has felt for too long like a separate practice, following in parallel with the other art activities. 

This residency and the previous book “How to forget about a song” are a celebration of a new chapter on my relationship with marking bodies and their portraiture.

This residency at Varsi helped me to bring to reality a new chapter of my tattooing-related art. it was an idea lying there silent for a long time, it manifested itself sometime but never tangibly. 

It feels like I have solved the riddle. All is one finally.”

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