DOMI'

Domenico Barra, better known as Dom�, is an Italian artist, poet and singer. He was born on the 9th September 1982 in the ancient Greek town of Neapolis know today as Napoli. It was a sunny morning the day his extraordinary life began, perhaps one of the few in his life because of course for most extraordinary beings... everyday is stormy. After roaming the streets of Napoli for many years, he eventually moved to England at the age of 19. Since then he has been conducing a bohemian life-style studying art, reading philosophy and psychology, writing poetry and joining the band Echoing Green, of which he is frontman and lyricist.
Dom� Barra first approach to art happened at the very young age of four when his father, ex card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party, hanged in the living room a copy of the famous painting of Pablo Picasso � Guernica�. Since the early age of eight, D. Barra felt the need of expressing his feelings about alarming world�s issues through the media of drawing. He was very often inspired by the works of the photographer Oliviero Toscani and the political cartoons of the artist Giorgio Forattini which were printed on the pages of the weekly supplement �Il Venerd� of the Italian newspaper �La Repubblica�. At the time of the first Gulf War, D. Barra depicted pictures of the battle he had seen on television for a school project part of his art class. D. Barra also had a brief experience as graffiti artist between the ages of fourteen to eighteen. During those years he had the chance of meeting many urban artists and shared with them ideas and techniques which resulted very important for D. Barra as his school studies were mainly focused on literature and economy.
The first (1924) and second (1929) Manifesto of Surrealism and the surrealist movement and revolution became the major inspirations for art practice, writing and life style since the age of twenty-two. Although a year of art studies and practices at the Leeds College of Art and Design and art classes at school, Dom� Barra declare himself as a self taught artist.
About his work as poet, Dom Barra likes to define his role as writer with these words: "What are my poems? They are just articulate lines on almost white papers, sentiments of a moment. A day after day brain and soul massacre. They are lights coming from the watch-tower of my intellect pointed on my feelings, on my discoveries, on my understanding of life. The shadows of these lights are in your interpretations, in your meanings. Pain and joy, peace and tears, obsessions and love, freedom and fears. Since I was a little boy, crawling through my days of life. Pictures flash through my mind constantly.
Emotions go through my body like sand goes through an egg-timer. When they reach the end, they become words and then they become bricks. My writing is the cement that goes through the bricks and holds the wall of my memory so that I can bring to life my perceptions one more time. On almost white papers I write my observations of existence everyday because I do not know how many days I have left and because it will might not happen again."