Wall art and tagging in Sao Paulo
Sao Paulo has remarkable tagger art. Two men – internationally known as Os Gemeos (The twins) – led the revolution in the city’s tagger tradition and made it into a unique art form. They even entered the contemporary modern art world. Not long ago Os Gemeos had a special showing at the Tate Modern art museum in London. The legacy is not theirs alone in the city, and there are many styles to be seen.
Here every available underpass wall and many buildings are beautifully — or at least elaborately — decorated. Much of the mural art is along the highways and freeway underpasses. This mural art is hard to see, though, unless you are In a car or bus driven by someone else. Traffic is too intense to gaze about, and the walls and underpasses are not pedestrian-friendly. Who knows how the artists got there, but the average citizen must have divided attention to enjoy the freeway art. To photograph it is even harder — most of these photos were taken from a car driven by someone else. Many interesting murals could not be photographed because of traffic. My favorite one is a long mural that appears to be a photo of historical scenes of city life. It goes on for many yards, but I couldn’t get a decent picture of this soccer-field sized photorealist mural because of traffic. This give me a reason — almost — to brave the traffic again to take another look.
Examples of the older, pre-Twins, wall art are still everywhere, but they tend to remain because they are not on prime viewing spaces.
Wall art is so pervasive that many commercial buildings have special murals in the tagger form. People and businesses who don’t want their walls decorated late at night with science fiction, fantasy, revolutionary, or sexual art have found a solution – they hire a painter to decorate their wall with a theme of their choice (whales, ethereal little girls, pets, parrots and flowers have a following). Out of apparent artistic solidarity the street taggers normally leave such walls alone, even at the aesthetic cost of having wall after wall of butterflies and flowers on all the children’s party centers. The surfer shops and sports stores are also stylized with characters straight out of Japanese manga art — huge macho characters surfing in cosmic freefall or flexing cartoonishly powerful bodies (to alert you to what is avaiLable inside).
The most ingenuous, though, are the prime spaces on the endless walls that section off the many commuter thoroughfares. All the pictures below are from these astonishing drive-time art shows that commuters see everyday. I suppose they need to see them every day because each piece of art is in focus for only a few seconds, unless you are fortunate/unfortunate enough to be gridlocked in front of an interesting one.
