From dust till drawn

The artist who paints with the sooty pollution of Sao Paulo

The pollution is so all-encompassing that you don’t even notice it any more. It wasn’t until an artist drew skulls on the soot caking the walls of a tunnel in Sao Paulo that the local authorities understood the seriousness of the situation and decided to start cleaning up their act.

“I transformed an underpass into a catacomb”, explains Alexandre Orion, an artist from Sao Paulo who became known throughout Brasil for his Mausoleum Project – a morbid series of artistic interventions in tunnels across the city. Orion used the project to protest not only against pollution, but against “a city that wasn’t made for pedestrians”. He became a graffiti artist in 1993 and graduated in art 10 years later, but the frightening levels of pollution in Sao Paulo always drew his attention. “It wasn’t by chance that I started using soot in my art; as well as growing up in a busy, polluted avenue, I noticed that the underpass I walked through to go home had become completely blackened in three months. One day I wiped my hand against the wall of the tunnel and realized how viscous and thick the black powder was”.

But it was the fact that people were breathing in filth on a daily basis that made the artist decide to intervene publicly. “I try and understand the city through my art, and not just use Sao Paulo as an atelier”. Alexandre Orion has definitely managed to draw attention to the problem, getting the media the public and, most importantly of all, the authorities talking.

He spent 13 nights in an underpass on Avenida Cidade Jardim (an affluent neighbourhood in São Paulo), and at least four times a night he would be interrupted with questions from Police officers or traffic wardens. “But they couldn’t have taken me in anyway, after all, I was basically cleaning the tunnel, wiping the dirt off the wall until the original yellow paint appeared once again”, he explains. After 17 days, the local council sent cleaners to wash the underpass. “But they merely cleaned the 300m stretch I’d drawn the skulls on, they only washed the rest off days later”. So Orion started drawing more skulls on other underpasses. “It turned into a game of cat and mouse: wherever I went the council would come running after me with their brooms”.

Before Mausoleum, Alexandre Orion came up with Metabiotics (photographs portraying the juxtaposition between the artist’s own graffiti and the surrounding urban landscape), and exhibited work in New York, San Francisco Roterdam. This year, Orion’s working on Poluição Sobre Tela (Pollution on Canvass), a series of paintings made out of the soot extracted for Mausoleum. “The cloths I used to wipe off the soot for Mausoleum were unusable afterwards. But once I washed them and decanted the dirt that was left over, it turned into pure soot, it was incredible”. Orion still draws skulls in underpasses every now and again to collect raw material for his latest project – but always using a mask and gloves, because the dioxin contained within the dirt might be carcinogenic (and even protecting himself, after eight hours he goes home feeling dizzy). “The paint is disgusting, but oily soot works really well on canvass. I mix the dirt with a binding agent and a catalyzer, and it becomes a watercolour”. Alexandre Orion assures that his new invention works. He’s probably found the perfect pigment to portray Sao Paulo with.

By Alexandre Xavier

Info:
www.alexandreorion.com

From dust till drawn

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