Italian Duo Design F50 inspired merchandise for Italy Sail Grand Prix

Having worked with Bermudian artist Alshante Foggo for merch for the Bermuda Sail Grand Prix, SailGP has once again championed local talent and collaborated with Italian artists: Sten.Lex for Taranto. This time we celebrate our sport, F50 engineering and the fact we’re Powered by Nature.

Sten and Lex, the latter of whom was born in Italy Sail Grand Prix host city Taranto, have created street art over the past two decades which is now part of the urban landscape in cities such as London, Paris, Barcelona, New York and Rome. The duo are considered pioneers of ‘Stencil Graffiti’ in Italy, and their work has been exhibited at many festivals, galleries and museums throughout the years.

For SailGP, Sten.Lex have designed a piece of artwork inspired by the F50 – the iconic and cutting-edge catamaran our athletes fly at breakneck speeds.

Utilising the duo’s traditional stencil process, the artwork celebrates our sport by incorporating the geometry, shapes and patterns of the F50 racing through the ocean. SailGP is Powered by Nature as we believe sport has the power to change the world, and the F50 is key to our vision as it is powered by only the wind and races on a natural ocean course.

As can be seen, Sten.Lex have perfectly captured the geometry, shapes and patterns of a flying F50, with four boats sitting atop rising and falling waves. The boats in the background are designed in solid colour, contrasting with the foreground F50 which is composed of many short lines.

This staccato design truly makes the F50 stand out from the continuous wavy lines representing the sea beneath it, but also shows that our boats are extensions of the water - as without the sea the F50 could not race.
It is a powerful and emphatic piece of artwork, and Sten.Lex explained their reasoning and inspiration for the design.

"In the last few years we have worked on abstract artworks, mostly with the composition of lines," Sten.Lex told SailGP.com. "For this commission we enjoyed to come back to the portrait, so we tried to compose an image that's close to the abstraction we have adopted but at the same time puts in the foreground the F50 catamarans to show the essence of this competition."

The duo also explained why they were attracted to using stencils ahead of other artistic mediums.

"Stencil is a kind of print process," continued Sten.Lex, "and every print process has its limits. These limits encourage us to develop the process, as we try to break the rules that the technique imposes.

"At the beginning we were attracted by stencils because it was an easy way to create simplified portraits with just one color. We were able to do it very fast on the street and that's the reason why we chose the stencil. Then we tried to find all the possibilities that the technique could give us.

"The stencil in our work is very important because it's part of the artwork itself. Stencil is seen as a medium, but in our case we usually show, in our artworks, the stencil matrix so the process is seen as part of the artwork itself. We call this process: Stencil Poster."

Various pieces of merchandise featuring Sten.Lex’s design will be available to buy in the run up to and during the Italy Sail Grand Prix, which takes place in Taranto on June 5-6 as the second event of Season 2.

Great Britain won the opening event of the campaign in Bermuda in April – setting a new record F50 racing speed in the process – and there are sure to be more thrills and spills in Taranto at the start of next month.