"Brazil: The Cultural Contemporary" at the Royal College of Art

The Royal College of Art in London held on January 21st 2011 the one-day conference Brazil: The Cultural Contemporary, as the result of research undertaken in Brazil in the previous year. According to Wired Magazine, the event aimed to inform a UK-based audience about the country’s visual culture, with a focus on areas of craft, design and social change.

Brazilian design writer and curator Adélia Borges, former director of the Museu da Casa Brasileira and design editor for the newspaper Gazeta Mercantil, presented the keynote lecture on Brazilian contemporary craft and design. Other speakers included Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholar Frederico Duarte, educator Kiki Mazzuchelli, graffiti specialist Tristan Manco, and Cristiana Tejo, coordinator of Education at Fundacão Joaquim Nabuco in Recife.

Read Also:

• Fashion, architecture and graphic design from Brazil in international forum in China
• Roots: Oiticica, Hélio (1937 – 1980)
• Alexandre Wollner featured in the “Distinguished Lecture Series” of the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Rogério Duarte exhibition in Australia reviewed by UK’s Grafik magazine
• For the 3rd consecutive time, CasaRex Receives a Communication Arts Award

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"Buy Prints Online" from Galeria Choque Cultural

We dropped by, and that is quite the with-it, street-artiste, Juxtapoz-style alternative gallery. And it’s in a neighborhood that is raging with giant street murals in a high underground-comix stylee.

*With its high-tech lowlife mix of keen design sense and grungola appropriated furniture, that place could be straight out of a novel. A Brazilian tupinipunk novel, presumably.

Projected to be a publishing house, Choque- as is called, ended up as a commercial QG of Brazilian young artists coming from graffiti, tattoo, graphic design, illustration and anything that speaks urban languages in Brazil.

In fact, Choque’s artists- composed of and eclectic mix of graduated designers and school drop outs, reflects today’s urban youth view on subjects involving social awareness, religion, vintage references, consumerism and today’s mutant urban feelings expressed in varied forms that goes from sculptures, abstract expressionisms to portraits of city sceneries, its people and its inner desires.

via Culture Shock Gallery, Sao Paulo | Beyond The Beyond.

Read Also:

• Gráfica Fidalga produces artwork for Creative Review magazine
• Born in Brazil issue @ Wallpaper*
• Roots: ADG Brasil (Associação dos Designers Gráficos)
• Trabalho Gráfica Urbano para o Bairro do Bixiga wins Gold Medal from IDSA’s 2010 IDEA awards
• “Brazil Contemporary” Exhibition opens in Rotterdam, The Netherlands

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NewGraphic #23 and PRO #02

Seems that after publishing the portfolios of illustrator Walter Vasconcelos and graphic designer Kiko Farkas in its bimonthly NewGraphic magazine (20 pages each, in issues #13 – 2007 and #21 – 2009, respectively), the Nanjing Arts Institute decided to make 2010 their ‘Year of Brazil’:

The #23 – April 2010 issue features over 100 projects of books, logos, packages, covers and pages of the famous Gráfica magazine designed by Oswaldo “Miran” Miranda, a “pioneer of Contemporary Graphic Design in Brazil”, as the magazine rightfully calls him in the first of the 20 pages allocated to the renowned Curitiba graphic artist.

In this issue, the publication also initiates a series of six articles that will present portfolios of Brazilian design companies and professionals with different styles and business models. Written and produced by Brazilian designer and educator Bruno Porto, each article will focus a specific theme. The first one, “Pop”, introduces over 80 projects of editorial design studio Laboratório Secreto and design agency Boldº_a design company in another 20 pages. Issue #24 will carry projects by eg.design and Tecnopop addressing “Identity”.

The Nanjing Arts Institute has also designated 42 pages of its new publication PRODESIGN to the Brazilian graphics. Its first two issues feature the illustration works of São Paulo’s (and Barcelona resident) Flavio de Morais and Rio de Janeiro’s Lula Palomanes, as well as the complete projects and texts of the two graphic design exhibitions presented by Bruno Porto in China in 2009, “DINGBATS BRASIL” and “One Year in Posters“. While NewGraphic is published in Chinese only, PRODESIGN is bilingual (Chinese / English). Pages of both publications can be seen in http://www.seecoo.com.cn/

Read Also:

• Kiko Farkas poster exhibition in China
• A Brazilian talk about Asian design
• 9th Brazilian Graphic Design Biennial in China
• 9th Brazilian Graphic Design Biennial goes to China
• Brazilian Posters in Warsaw International Poster Biennale

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OS GÊMEOS A mural by two Brazilian graffiti artists who call themselves Os Gêmeos has burst upon a corner of Houston Street and the Bowery (photo: Justin Maxon/The New York Times)

Which is to say that their fantastic, epic mural, on a concrete wall about 17 feet high and about 51 feet long, is light and frothy, a dream of happiness with an underlying chord of melancholy. And everything in it is exquisitely fine-tuned and detailed, a dazzlement of effortless technique that sustains long bouts of close looking. It will remain up until March.

The delicate black lines that thread throughout the entire image like drizzled charcoal dust are feats of spray-can painting. The prismatic color of everything else has a saturation unusual in graffiti art. The sky alone is half a spectrum. It begins with deep blue green at the top and descends through green and chartreuse to a golden, sunbathed yellow that serves as land, water, light, human skin and more.

And the storybook imagery is out of this world, yet not. Sure, people and things often levitate or are impossibly stacked, and the setting is a tad unreal — simultaneously wet and dry, or hard and spongy. But both the subways of New York and the favelas of São Paulo are here, and the figures wear brightly patterned garments (thanks to ingenious small-bore stenciling) that seem truly Brazilian. Plus, there are enough fish to placate the fish lovers of both cities. Sometimes these creatures have scales of many colors. Often they carry something in their mouths, like the bringers of good luck they are supposed to be: radiant little shacks, people or heads, whole figures. It’s magical realism with a touch of grit.

While the onslaught of figures, episodes and colors is at first overwhelming, a casual left-to-right reading suggests some narrative possibilities. Basically what we have here is a tale of escape and growth that begins in darkness and — after taking a few tips from the Bible, Hieronymus Bosch and M. C. Escher — ends in a stunning vortex of brilliant color. At far left, in the gray dimness of a narrow, cell-like space, a small figure strains toward the golden light seeping through a chink in the wall. Wearing pants, a jacket and a girlish scalloped bonnet and shouldering a bag, she’s leaving home, as the song says. A small spotted dog watches from the safety of a tenderly, elaborately wood-grained floor.

Through the chink the golden world awaits, arrayed around and above what seems to be a nearly circular waterfall; it’s a world populated by spirit guides, with or without gills. And it all adds up, or at least it is all visibly linked. You’re supposed to keep going, from one thing to the next, gaining wisdom along the way.

To sketch in some of the action, the connections begin with a boy on a four-poster bed (Dreamland’s point of origin) with a peacock on his back, using a second peacock as an ear trumpet. He listens to a whale whose skin, a mosaic of blues, is dotted with extra eyes. Atop the whale lies a girl (maybe our heroine, but older) so relaxed that the dots on her lavender-pink blouse are rising into the atmosphere like bubbles. The whale’s tail hooks over the rail of a snaking subway track, while the beast itself balances on a stack of three figures teetering on a rope bridge with iffy wood slats (San Luis Rey, anyone?) extending from one side of the waterfall to the other. (Don’t ask.)

Back on the tracks a subway car — the N train — is straddled by a large boy, who has human heads gathered around him like the day’s catch and a galleon on his head. A fish that is also a dirigible on its side is anchored to his hand. (Behind all this stretches a yellow out-of-focus landscape where the hills are faces.)

Next we are in the city where two boys who could be Os Gêmeos (Portuguese for the Twins, which the 35-year-old Pandolfo brothers are) are cramped inside a two-story, two-room house. The tracks continue into a station with an Escher-like mural of bright checkerboards receding to a vanishing point, and also the tag of Dash Snow, a New York graffiti artist who died last month and to whom the mural is dedicated.

The station is also part of a boat (touring the waterfalls?), with plush red seats tufted with yellow faces. At the front of the boat, next to a protective figurehead, sits a knowing young woman looking out at us amid bundles of patterned fabric. She has little houses in her green-and-black hair and wears a blouse whose planetlike dots are, this time, staying put.

The final third of the mural explodes in the rainbow vortex that is fabulously explicit in color but physically indeterminate. Sometimes it is a beach at low tide, sometimes a prison wall, sometimes quicksand, at least for a figure carrying a grandfather clock. Also here is a small Trojan horse (or maybe a mule), which brings back the lovely wood grain in warmer colors. Its neck is open and forms a double cameo for the faces of a boy and girl.

This telling omits many wonderful details. One of the best is front and nearly center in the image: a boy who seems to sit on a waterspout, wearing a fish mask and a T-shirt that is one of the painting’s best moments. It depicts a landscape: note the white stenciled stone wall, the changing greens of the tiny stenciled trees, the golden setting sun. It is an idyll of pastoral, escape-from-the-city living, cottage and all.

via Art Review – Os Gêmeos – Os Gêmeos, Brazilian Graffiti Artists, Create a World on a New York Wall – NYTimes.com.

Read Also:

• Rojo Magazine’s “RojoOut Urban Stage”, São Paulo
• Luiz Carlos Barreto lifetime achievements highlighted in the New York Times
• Roots: Oiticica, Hélio (1937 – 1980)
• Roots: J. Borges (1935)
• Brazilian posters for the Green Movement in Iran

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Eltono’s piece for Rojo Out Urban Stage

After São Paulo city officials ordered graffiti cleanup crews to leave work by Os Gêmeos and other famous São Paulo street artists alone, art collective and magazine Rojo asked the city’s Urban Development Department to allow them to tap artists like Tofer and MWM Graphics to help spice up drab concrete structures across the city. “It was the first time they’ve allowed it,” says Zagg Guimaraes, Rojo’s associate director in Brazil. “We’re trying to make the city more beautiful.” Dubbing the operation RojoOut, the public art exhibit continues a similar three-year project in Barcelona that they started in 2006.

Sponsored by Smart, the just-completed project commissioned Rojo-affiliated artists to paint 11 concrete structures including air-vent columns and blank walls across São Paulo over a few weeks. Nuria Mora, Tony de Marco, Superblast and Eltono got on scaffolds to paint, while MWM Graphics, Ovni and Tofer scaled and drew their work but handed it off to collaborators to carry out.

Spread across three locations, Avenida Juscelino Kubitschek by the Povo and Ibirapuera parks and near the Ibirapuera Park entrance, the permanent exhibit happily faces no threat of removal.

via RojoOut Urban Stage São Paulo.

Read Also:

• Galeria Choque Cultural featured on Wired Magazine
• Os Gêmeos Create a World on a New York Wall
• Trabalho Gráfica Urbano para o Bairro do Bixiga wins Gold Medal from IDSA’s 2010 IDEA awards
• Born in Brazil issue @ Wallpaper*
• São Paulo’s Modern Art Museum “Brazilian Design Today: Frontiers”

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