PROFILE
Jazz, Futurism & A Massive Book Collection
At Work With Italian Tattoo Artist Alberto Lelli
When I spoke to Alberto Lelli, he’d been working for nearly a week straight. New York’s tattoo scene isn’t lacking talent but he’s had a full book, so he’s looking forward to resting in the summer heat. “I’m Italian, you know,” he’s Italian, from Bologna. “So for me, that [heat] should be on all the time," he concedes.
Lelli moved to New York nearly four years ago after initially getting the itch on a visit when he was only 23. “I came to NY with my family in 2019 and I completely fell in love with it,” he tells me, “and, obviously, at that age you perceive only the cool stuff”.
By 2022, after spending some time in London, Lelli brought with him his eye for cool stuff, incorporating it into his vivid, energetic and hyperbolic tattooing style.
Pulling from both Italy’s futurismo [1] from a century ago and the American Traditional style still in vogue today, the language he’s developing in his work is directly tying the two disparate ideas together.
This began back home in Bologna, in making the decision to attend liceo artistico—essentially high school aged art school—for his secondary education. He saw his path laid out before him in art history and painting. “When I was finishing school, I was like ‘Okay, what am I going to do?...I want to be a painter.’”
His painting practice and study of art history delivered fascinations with the movements across Europe in the early 20th century, many of which sought to assert a new, more present role of art in a rapidly modernizing daily life. Cubism and the Bauhaus asked questions of a changing world while offering answers to be questioned by succeeding movements like Futurism. All viewed their work through a new lens of modernity and all proposed new gestures for expressing their ideas. Picasso and Duchamp were capturing movement and exaggerating forms in Italy, and the Futurists followed suit.
In said Futurists, Lelli found one source of inspiration in particular: Fortunato Depero [2] . A fellow Italian most famous for his bold, geometric graphic work for brands like Campari and Vanity Fair, Depero’s striking simplicity of his imagery and vibrance in color influenced the foundation of Lelli’s eye.
“Depero is at the same level as Picasso to me,” he said while comparing his influences, “he was one who was reinterpreting everyday life, the way we shape figures… I was like ‘oh, I love this’”.
It was about this time, at 18, that Lelli got his first tattoo, inspiring him to begin translating his talents into drawing tattoos, fitting the references he took from his studies to the much more medium-constrained art of tattooing. It’s in the long-standing tradition of the American Traditional style that he found a natural partner for his futurist, geometric designs.
Following the rules set out by American Traditional’s elder statesmen like Don Ed Hardy, Sailor Jerry and carried forward by New York stalwarts Tony Polito and Bert Krak, Lelli’s current style began to take shape. Strong black outlines filled with vivid primary colors and their combinations tend to retain their contrast and tonality on skin as it ages, as well as delivering impactful pieces. While some of the tradition’s tried and true motifs appear in Lelli’s work, he’s determined to keep his references specific to himself.
A remarkable example of this partnership and his particular twist on it can be found pinned to the top of Lelli’s instagram page: a futurist bonanza in shape and movement, celebrating the long relationship that jazz has enjoyed with the London neighborhood of Dalston. It’s a party in simple hues, a caricature of chaos clamoring to life across a client’s back—barmen and brass players criss-crossing through the venue, doors seemingly half-open leading to high rises outside.
When asked, Alberto is quick to confirm that both jazz and his adoptive city have come to influence his outlook and style. “The energy of New York is unique, it’s amazing! And of course it twists your style,” he says. Saxophones and trumpets crop up in different pieces, often referencing—or directly alongside—other visual touch points of life in New York City. “I was already doing jazz players because…[in the 20’s] there was the jazz scene,” he continues, “I think living in New York, seeing the streets and the elements…when I started doing players here they completely changed…here you feel more in the flow of the thing.”
And he stays in the flow of things, picking out new references from bike rides, galleries, books. He quickly integrated himself into New York’s tattoo scene by booking appointments with some of the older artists he respected like the aforementioned Bert Krak, then further being sure to visit other shops, other artists. The outside influences remain important to him too, we discussed for a while book collections, notably the size and breadth of the 300,000 volume library once owned by Karl Lagerfeld. He lauds the commitment to a craft, to the diversification of knowledge that a collection like this takes and what it contributes to one’s artistic universe: “these people…they’re amazing, they’re geniuses, but they arrived there because of [their collections], too”. His personal collection includes books on fashion, on folk art, and, naturally, on futurism.
Eventually, we reached the topic of Italy, comparing New York’s pace of life to that of Rome. “When I go back, when I go to Italy, I’m so relaxed and I see how my friend’s live their lives… they live a chill life”.
“Leaving Europe was difficult,” he admits, understandably. “The way you build up relationships and how people live is different there. But for tattooing, there’s no better place. I felt my style was really fitting the city and people here were coming to the shop and giving me total freedom in the realization of the designs.”
“Sometimes I think it could be the next move after New York,” he proposes, “If I live in Rome and I come here every two months and I do all the appointments, in Rome, I’m sitting in Piazza Navona eating an ice cream”.
However, there’s the eternal conflict: “probably this is a very Italian part of me…I don’t want to work myself into insanity”. But that doesn’t mean he won’t. Whether his future is in Rome, Alberto Lelli’s futurism is in New York now.
“I’m glad that my 23 year old self—a very stubborn version of myself—pushed me to make such a hard decision to start work early on my paper and been able to move to New York City in 2022. I still love it like the first day”.