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Paulo Nimer Pjota was 15 years old when he sold his first painting and was already a three-year veteran. “I don’t really know what life is like without painting,” the 37-year-old Brazilian artist told me. In everything I do, in the movies I watch, the books I read.” It may not have anything to do with art, but I get something out of it that I can use.”
Pjota’s studio, which used to be his bedroom before he got married and had a son, is in a quiet part of São Paulo: there are shelves with ants, skulls, postcards and other things, skateboards hang on the wall and the desk overflows with tubes of paint. A pile of drawings he made as a teenager, found at his parents’ house, sits amid the fruitful chaos.
We catch her on the phone as she travels to set up her first UK exhibition at a South London gallery. Topic Bewitched (Bewitched)it will feature 11 new paintings on canvas, hung on a large and intricate wall. The extended works show a magical and magical effect, on a surface filled with glitter in his layers of acrylic, oil and tempera.
In another image, pink butterflies emerged from a woman’s womb; elsewhere, a monkey picks up a fallen urn. Gods, fish and large blooming flowers return. Pjota, a skater and tattoo artist, likens his work to a hip-hop music producer, who takes inspiration from pictures and images from ancient places, Brazilian culture, art history, exercise books and children’s books.
He said: “Fairytales have always fascinated me. “The stories I heard at my parents’ house, in the media, these things form a big part of our lives since I was very young.” Being a father, I started reading many stories to my son and I was looking back at the drawings I used to make when I was a child.
In The Land Before Time for Jorge, two cacti appear, one crying, the other laughing, like the masks of a Greek tragedy, except their faces have the characteristics of Japanese veterans. Pjota says the background is from a 15th century painting of a colonial invasion of America and the robed couple in the background is from a French painting. “I made this picture for my son the moviewhat everyone in Brazil saw when they were children.”
The mural in London, which will feature creatures playing musical instruments, is a return to his youth among the graffiti and hip-hop of São José do Rio Prêto, his hometown in the countryside of São Paulo state. Pjota started making art after studying at a hip-hop school, which is a club that teaches people to enjoy music, DJing and photography in a city with a culture of non-culture.
“I started a group with two of my friends, then I started another group with the teachers of the school.” I was a 13-year-old boy who was spraying with 25-year-old boys. Twins, Right now, No. It was very interesting, very dark, the beginning of Brazilian literature. ” This first sale came from a community project at the local PT office, the Workers’ Party. “Hip-hop is street culture, it’s about change and the countryside.”
He was attracted to the use of brushes as it is possible to paint and he created his own style, painting both on the walls of the city and on canvas at home. “I messed around with different types of graffiti: throws, wild stylesbut soon I started making my own things, very different from what was going on.”
At the age of 17 he moved to São Paulo to study at an art college, but his friends were still the older boys he met on the streets. Photographs were very difficult here. There were many policemen, who were very brutal and I was not a child. His first exhibition at the São Paulo gallery Mendes Wood DM, in 2012, had larger paintings than what he is currently producing, his creations such as crabs, crystals and anatomical drawings, different but floating and visible from each other in a monochrome style – the way it is in pictures. wall. Some works were made on sheets of metal or old cloth found. He also said that there is a strong sense of expression in recent works. “The signals overlap in a subtle way,” he says. The merger is no longer the goal of this project. “It’s a tool for creating a new universe of myth and wonder.”
