The artwork created 2020 by Manu Invisible (Cagliari, 1990) in response to the commission of Roma Tre University’s Department of Philosophy, Communication and Performing Arts, is an image painted on one of the three walls framing the internal courtyard of the main academic building, usually frequented by students.

In a composition based on layer principle, on a crepuscular background the artist inscribes the letters forming the signifier spirit in the geometry offered by the building architecture, overlaying the whole scene with the letters forming the famous Hegelian quote, which is the commission’s specific focus.

The image, having the deliberate purpose of staging the Hegelian philosophical system, appears as an

intertwining of graphic and pictorial capabilities
(Rancière 2004, p. 15)

in which symbolic references and autonomous fragments of the

indifferent democracy of writing
(ib.)

work to build a

model [that] disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible.
(ib.)

and contributing to define

a new idea of pictorial surface as a surface of shared writing
(ib.)

In Manu Invisible the academic training – in terms of art thesis – and the anti-artistic practice of writing – in terms of art antithesis – coexist, fueling the necessary contradiction that Groys (2008) identifies as a constitutive element of modernity of art.
His “ways of doing” (Rancière 2004, p. 13) emerges in the indefinable perimeter of an idea which combines “art” and “street” and which, at the beginning of the 21st century, puts at the center of its reflections the systematic placement of images in public urban space, given back to us by the media-oriented public discourse with the label of Street art.

The contemporary debate on this topic raises fresh questions whose answers would have different purposes, including determining whether it is art or not, shaping a definition and identifying its specificity.

Riggle (2010) argues that

an artwork is Street art, if and only if, its material use of the street is internal to its meaning,

while Baldini (2016) singles out Street art’s specificity in the illegality of the practice that would establish its constitutive paradigm, in other words: its subversiveness.