PublicArt

It's impossible to walk through the streets and squares of Rio de Janeiro without coming across visual interventions of all kinds in the city's urban spaces. Tags, graffiti, posters, and murals are some of the forms through which art manages to intervene in the general public's gaze outside traditional exhibition institutions. Each with its own specificities, they all share the fact of being transgressive in their origins.

Image description: The image is a photograph of a monumental clock located on a tower. The spatial arrangement begins on the left, where we see the adjacent building with some windows and side structures. In the center, the clock is the highlight, with prominent Roman numerals and hands. On the right, there is another similar tower, though less detailed. In the background, we see an urban area with buildings and streets. The clock features an inscription in Portuguese that reads "NOSSA PAÍS ESTÁ ONDE SOMOS AMADOS."

The best-known of all, and also the furthest from formal definitions of visual arts, tagging works as individual signatures (known as tags), whose driving force is the challenge of pulling off feats by managing to tag the hardest-to-reach places in the city – rooftops or the high façades of buildings, monuments, guarded spaces, and so on. Without much sympathy from the population because of the "visual pollution" they cause, taggers gradually began to gain status as artists or even to move into more accepted mediums such as graffiti.

Image description: The image is a photograph of a building with graffiti. From back to front, we see a vibrant blue façade with windows and doors. At the bottom, there is a panel decorated with geometric patterns in shades of blue and green. On the right, a tree is partially visible. In the center, there is a signpost with a no-parking symbol.

With its immense, colorful, and well-designed murals, graffiti became, throughout the 21st century, a force on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Many who once only signed names on the streets began taking part in a movement whose works became a positive part of the carioca landscape. Artists such as Toz, Gais AMA, Bragga, Piá, Anarkia, Fins, or Ment are some of the names who achieved a high aesthetic quality and went on to become part of major galleries. Today we can see areas of the city, such as the warehouses of the Zona Portuária, completely covered with these works.

Still within the urban sphere, another important strand consists of actions by artist collectives that made the streets and their spaces the support for their work. Also in the early 2000s (more precisely, in 1999), one must mention the collective Atrocidades Maravilhosas, an idea of the artist Alexandre Vogler, and a call for twenty artists to create works using the handcrafted technique of lambe-lambe (paper posters glued onto the city's walls). The group then chose spaces that were abandoned and had little connection to the visual arts – such as Avenida Brasil, Presidente Vargas, or Avenida 24 de Maio – to display the works. More recently, the collective MUDA used the tile technique to independently create a series of panels around the city, in the most diverse places and at the most different scales.

Image description: This is a photograph of a wall with a colorful mural. From left to right, we see a series of colorful geometric shapes arranged randomly. The colors range from green, blue, yellow, red, and pink. In the background, we see the entrance of a building with a metal roof and a window. To the right, there is a street with parked bicycles and a few distant vehicles.

These manifestations may leave a stronger mark on the Carioca imagination regarding the city's visuality and its relationship with the visual arts than the works most esteemed by the art world. Either way, they are proof that, in Rio de Janeiro, in any neighborhood, class, or political-cultural background, the presence of an aesthetic outlook that transforms life is present and pulsing.