| Rico Frico aka Rico the butcher aka Error 404, is wearing a white apron splattered in red paint and tattooing the words “No Style Fuck” onto the ass of a girl leaning over a table covered in red satin. I’m sitting outside on the sidewalk with some people, watching the display through a storefront window, which has been made to look like a television screen. Above the window is the name of the store, Fleischerei (Butcher shop), which is not actually a tattoo parlor…all the time. Unsuspecting passersby look up to see the bare ass of some cute chick wearing a silver, pigtailed wig and a thong, smoking a cigarette and blowing kisses. |  |
WhatEver – Maya Diego
Rico Frico aka Rico the butcher aka Error 404, is wearing a white apron splattered in red paint and tattooing the words “No Style Fuck” onto the ass of a girl leaning over a table covered in red satin. I’m sitting outside on the sidewalk with some people, watching the display through a storefront window, which has been made to look like a television screen. Above the window is the name of the store, Fleischerei (Butcher shop), which is not actually a tattoo parlor…all the time. Unsuspecting passersby look up to see the bare ass of some cute chick wearing a silver, pigtailed wig and a thong, smoking a cigarette and blowing kisses. Meanwhile, Rico outlines the letters F. U. C. K., his white butcher hat bent over her backside, deep in concentration. It makes for some pretty good live TV, especially on your way home from work on a Wednesday.
Ricardo Lee Perez is a tattoo/street/visual artist born to Hispanic/American and German parents in Frankfurt am Main. He moved to Berlin three years ago and began collaborating with four other lowbrow artists; Norbert, Daniel, Paul and Vladi. They formed WhatEver and began organizing fine art guerilla exhibitions, making street art posters/stickers/sculptures, designing one-of-a-kind silk-screened clothes and, of course, tattooing. W.T. Norbert, another WhatEver guy and Rico’s mentor, is the head tattoo artist at No Pain No Brain, which opened last May and operates in conjunction with the infamous American bar in Berlin, White Trash. No Pain No Brain also houses art exhibitions and is unusually friendly in a city where Hell’s Angels monopolizes the ink trade, which explains the shattered windows in parlors across town. Norbert began tattooing in the dark corners of the old White Trash, before it moved to its more spacious current location and before No Pain No Brain opened. His ability to work in such unorthodox venues probably explains my track record with his protégé; the next time I see Rico after the Fleischerei, he’s in the corner of the King Kong Club during a casual fashion show, preparing to finish a tattoo on his friend who’s moving back to America the following day.
Since our last encounter, Rico had been in Vevey, Switzerland, at the opening of “Hypocrite,” a group exhibition in an old prison where each artist had his or her own cell. His paintings utilize a lot of overlapping patterns and stencils, a nod to street art in a different context. Berlin is a city that embraces street art, not just graffiti. Most buildings have been adorned with some type of imagery, there’s even a guy who just rides his bike around, painting the number 6 on basically everything from overturned cobblestones to movie posters, abandoned couches, etc. The imagery on the city’s structures builds until entire narratives are played out on cement walls, arranged through random acts of creative vandalism. Stickers overlap stencils, which overlap intricate cutouts and characters. Rico explains the importance of overlapping patterns and imagery in his own work, saying that it creates form and structure, adds history, but allows you to improvise. Maybe the city’s history has something to do with why Berlin’s walls are treated like canvases today, like arenas for illegal expression. Rico and the guys do street art, but don’t just keep it two-dimensional. They make sculptural graffiti from Styrofoam or wood and affix it to facades, adding another layer to the urban cultural commentary. At the Fleischerei, local lowbrow artists sell unique t-shirts, prints, buttons, books and everything street-art related, like the strawberry stickers, which have become leitmotifs on the city’s landscape.
When I ask Rico what it is that WhatEver is trying to accomplish, he says that he just wants to create beautiful things. Anyone that has been to Berlin knows that it is not exactly a beautiful city, but that it, in itself, inspires its citizens to add their own aesthetic. And, not to make the city beautiful necessarily, but just to make people stop and think, even if all they’re thinking is “why the hell is that guy painting a 6 on that park bench?” After a while, these repetitive signs and designs become familiar and almost friendly, like an inside joke between the artist and the onlooker who stops for a second to appreciate. In an ever-increasingly commerce-driven global art world, it’s very refreshing to be confronted with visual evidence that there are still artists creating art for art’s sake. The definition of art is not limited to overly critiqued canvases in academic white cubes, which is becoming a narrow view held by contemporary culture as the market continues to peak. Sometimes it’s important to step out of the auction house or away from the gallery to find creation at its best, on the street. For more information on WhatEver and upcoming events, log onto www.whatever-berlin.de
