The PUMA art festival came to the Centro Cultural Recoleta over the past weekend. Artists, photographers, musicians and DJs came together to present and create their work in front of the public. Photographer Natasha Ali was there and shares her vision of what went down.

Pinta tu Barrio is a project run out of Quilmes under the auspices of Louis Danjou and his girlfriend Flavia Paravisi and other volunteers. They paint public walls with colourful graffiti; striving to “create a dialogue between the communities and the artists, making art accessible to all and generating a connection between people and the place where they live”, in what they describe as an ‘open air museum’. Andy Donohoe travelled to Quilmes to document their work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes heroism comes in the shape of a tin of paint. In 2010 three young artists from Chile, France and Argentina pooled their talent, good will and imaginations to launch Pinta tu Barrio – a project breathing new life into run-down neighbourhoods in Quilmes.

A year later, over 50 murals have been splashed across neglected public walls in the city by constellations of local and international artists, slowly transforming the city in a quiet rainbow revolution.

Far from seeing graffiti as a nuisance, the project has been welcomed as a public service by both the local authorities and residents alike – with people often stopping by to request work on their own houses and businesses.

Although materials and equipment are sometimes donated by private companies, these artists offer their services largely out of good will and their own pockets for the benefit of the people, their neighbourhoods and the city as a whole.

Using their own styles to interpret local customs and traditions creates a dialogue between the communities and the artists, making art accessible to all and generating a connection between people and the place where they live – in what they describe as an “open air museum”.

Projects

Louis Danjou, whose “Grolou” tag can be found all over San Telmo and various corners of Buenos Aires – where he lived before moving to Quilmes – came to Argentina four years ago.

“It’s easiest to paint where you live,” he says reviewing a 12m wall that is soon to be covered in bright shapes and litres of latex paint. Wherever he has lived, art has blossomed across walls and buildings chronicling the evolution of his personal style.

Originally from France, Louis is one of three artists that started the Pinta tu Barrio project out of a desire to improve the neighbourhoods where they lived and bring artists together to fuse ideas, cultures and experiences in art.

The project works closely with other artist collectives and small organisations like Collage Lab, with whom they are currently painting the exterior of a young offenders’ institute in Palermo, Buenos Aires.

Pinta tu Barrio is broader than a personal project and the scale of their achievement has nothing to do with artists’ ego.

“It’s not just for us,” says Louis from outside a young offenders’ institute that he is redecorating with his girlfriend Flavia (“Blu Shei Wei”), a painter and tattoo artist – and Collage Lab – a collective of artists run social projects like painting workshops in villas.

“It’s for everyone, the neighbourhood. People often come by and ask us to paint their houses or businesses for them – our work has very positive repercussions,” he says.

Solidaridad Argentina

According to Louis, there is a strong artists’ community in Buenos Aires. Not only do most artists respect each others’ work and are so less likely to paint over it – but it makes projects like painting the prison viable.

“Each artist has their own talents – we pool our resources for these projects. It’s completely different doing art in the streets here. Es una mierda, it’s not graffiti or “street art” – I use collage, paint, stencils, stickers – whatever’s at hand.

Once again it falls to NGOs and private individuals to plug holes in the welfare of society. Tamara García Selvood, who works for Collage Lab, says: “The government doesn’t approach artists to help them – it’s people like us who take the initiative and present them with projects.

In Quilmes enormous paintings of eyes, women, cats, mythical creatures and dreamscapes are brightening dilapidated areas of the city.

Partly designed in advance, part improvised – the artists paint walls, shutters, buildings, schools and shops with what they describe as “colours and positive messages”.

Not lacking in talent, imagination or man power it seems unjust that the only thing holding this social initiative back is funding and investment, when it provides such an important service to the local community.

Apart from tango, pimped asados and prolific mullet wearing – street art is another area that Buenos Aires does rather well.

Grafitti culture here is different to New York or London because it’s not illegal, or if it is then nobody’s interested in enforcing the laws, says Rick Powell – editor of Juanele art blog- who’s been leading tours around the city for nearly a year and a half.

There’s less of the vandalism vibe here – graffiti isn’t a public nuisance and San Telmo, the oldest barrio in the city and home to artists and galleries for centuries, is a monument to generations of graffiti artists that have left their mark on its battered walls.

In Argentina, artists can paint in broad daylight, so their technique is different to time-pressed international counterparts who have to keep one eye on the lookout for police patrols. Some work is even commissioned.

Grolou, one of the artists whose work Rick introduces you to, has now moved to Quilmes and is gradually transforming the town into a living art project with full support of the local authorities and growing requests from local businesses to revamp their buildings.

According to Rick, there’s a cross-over between graffiti and mural art here in the city and the tour takes you on a journey from work that’s been left untouched for years, to parts that are constantly updated with new artists making their mark on the city.

Familiar with all of the big names on the San Telmo scene, Juanele point out signature details in the art that helps identify their work and help untangle the meaning behind the shapes.

Starting at the Spanish cultural centre (CCEBA) the tour starts with an introduction to the city’s graffiti heritage. Part on foot, part in a van to save time the tour hops around street corners and underpasses, park walls and precincts in the southern part of the neighbourhood looking at street art.

Making its way along the narrow pavements and bustling streets, the art walk is as much an introduction to the barrio as the art that decorates it, including the traditional fileteado signs hanging over shop-fronts and bars.

The second part of the tour takes in a selection of the best exhibitions, which gives potential buyers the chance to speak to gallery owners, while everyone else looks at the fresh work and innovative installations of young artists that are bringing their shows to San Telmo.

The Wussman gallery is a particular highlight, light and cool after the beating afternoon sun – glass panels in the floor reveal the excavation work that is being carried out underneath it.

The tour finishes at Art Factory, which is as much an organic art project as a hostel, for a look at stencil art and a cool beer on the terrace. Each room (booked until the end of the year) was painted by a different artist and each surface is decorated by a different hand.

Buenos Aires has a dynamic art scene. The world of street art is constantly updating and re-inventing itself with everything from cubist designs to three-storey political murals, while new artists and exhibitions are bringing fresh art and new ideas to the city.

Affordable and completely worth it – this isn’t one to miss, whether you’re new to the city or not.

As Rick says, something that’s there today might vanish under a fresh coat of paint tomorrow – so don’t wait.

Red, white, and black colours full of slogans, animals, and old Soviet Union-esque labour propaganda decorate the walls of the upstairs section of the alternative urban art gallery Hollywood in Cambodia. Inspired by the enthusiastic punk rock guitar riffs, artist Tester scratches away an image of a laborer hoisting a large hammer upon a plastic transparency.

One of the members of the Run Don’t Walk collective and an inaugurator of the Hollywood in Cambodia – or HIC – gallery, Tester sums up his philosophy of the urban art scene. “You can show something with art,” he explains, “It’s beautiful, it makes the city more spontaneous. If we see something is boring we say, ‘Let’s paint it!’”

Tester and the other members of the HIC crew have recently taken steps to encouraged outsiders to learn more about street art through their last open door art showing called ‘Sindicato’, and they have also begun new stencil workshops aimed at teaching interested street artists the techniques behind stencil art. Unlike many art showings, the open door access of ‘Sindicato’ allowed anyone interested to have the ability to visit the upstairs gallery and see the artists in action as they worked together with ideas and styles to form a new distinct presentation of their work.

The group always collaborates between collectives to share and elaborate upon their art instead of present individual artistic works as in the case of many art galleries. The name ‘Sindicato’ can be seen as a political message, but Tester justifies the name more as a term which best defines their artistic cooperation, with a goal of innovation.

“We are accustomed to working together,” says Tester. “Each one comes to paint something. It shows in progress. Some paint, some like to cut, but essentially we all do everything. It’s cooperative. The idea of this showing is that someone brings an image, another cuts it, and another paints.”

The concept of working together and the constant goal for innovation and creativity can be referred back to the original idea and history in opening the art gallery. Located on Thames 1885 in the hip Palermo Soho neighborhood, the HIC gallery began when a group of friends with a new bar got together. Bar co-owner Pablo Fuchs says that he and his business partners wanted the dream of owning a bar, but they also wanted something more unique. It was in 2005, that a friend of Fuchs’s introduced him to the book ‘Hasta la Victoria Stencil’, a compilation of urban stencil art of the moment with photos of works that different artists had done. Fuchs and his business partner e-mailed some of the artists and proposed a new idea, and new partnership.

“We didn’t know how something from the street would be in an indoor environment,” says Fuchs. “It was the first situation of its type; we wanted it to modify the reality, and to be a contradiction.”

Fuchs decided on the English named Post Street Bar because he wanted to get rid of the negative stereotype of urban art as an unwanted societal element, and to instead embrace some of the younger street artists and their ability to paint or “post” on the walls. Six months after opening the bar, Fuchs explains that the process of inviting the artists to use the space as an artist’s playground ended up being a “good movement with maturation, and innovative firm steps.”

Tester says that when the urban art collectives Bs. As. Stencils, Run Don’t Walk and Malatesta were invited to decorate the principal downstairs floor of the bar, the guys at “Post” didn’t have a way to repay them, so they offered them a place to transform their typical street images and designs to an indoor environment. From this moment in March of 2006 the Hollywood in Cambodia urban art gallery was born.

“We began to do things, we began to have art showings and invite friends, and it was beginning to take form. A little bit anarchic…” Tester pauses, “there aren’t rules, it’s fun!”

Today Hollywood in Cambodia (a name inspired from the Dead Kennedy’s song ‘Holiday in Cambodia’) is operated by the original artists that decorated the paternal Post Street Bar. Comprised of the three urban art collectives, HIC has turned their upstairs gallery into an outlet for new and alternative urban artwork. Tester explains that the gallery is something to be shared and orientated towards illustration, graffiti, stencil, urban art, tattoo, skater and punk rock.

The gallery also changes time to time with around ten different art showings every year. Decisions are talked about beforehand and then different urban artists from around Buenos Aires are invited with the idea of collaboration to do whatever they want. This concept is seen best on the outdoor bar terrace next to the art gallery. Two large building walls surround the terrace which contains artistic drawings, stencils and graffiti of anything from a life size cheetah, to a Johnny Cash stenciled face covering a dress and legs of a school girl. Many of the strange varieties of images found on the terrace are due to the fact that new artists constantly add to the already established artworks. Fuchs adds that these artists are encouraged to participate artistically in whatever way possible as long as it doesn’t cover someone else’s art, or contain a graffiti tag.

An agreement between the collective’s members states that none of their collaborative artwork may take on tags, names or any individual accolades. Tester mentions that the goal is for creative innovation, and that the most unique and fortifying aspect of the artwork seen in the Post Street Bar and HIC is that each person works off of, and integrates their own distinctive styles to create something interesting.

With the stencil finished Tester spray paints it to the lower section of the wall. He finishes his beer, turns off the raging punk music and goes home. Co-Owner Fuchs closes down the upstairs gallery and begins to explain his pleasure so far with the way the cooperative relationship between HIC and his bar have turned out.

“This collective is the collective of collectives!” he says. “Artists can tend to be very individualistic, these guys repeat the necessity to create something new, and here it’s valued.”

For more information visit: The Post Street Bar website www.poststreetbar.com or the Hollywood in Cambodia website www.hollywoodincambodia.com.ar for any news and events.

“Graffiti is a crime,” Brazilian street artist Alexandre Orion reminds me, as we chat during Puma’s International Urban Art Festival in Buenos Aires. Obvious that may be, but its controversial status seems easy to forget in a world where top graffiti artists’ discarded pizza boxes are sold to fans on eBay, and where even square professionals like newspaper editors and publicists are doing stencils on the crumbly barrio walls.

The slick festival itself where Orion’s work was shown in May seems to reinforce the message that graffiti is mainstream and acceptable, big business even. But at the core of his work is a thoughtful challenge to the status quo, and a direct engagement with the city, which transports my imagination outside of the shiny exhibition centre where we sit.

“I live on the street, the street is my life,” he says. “I try to create a connection between the place, the technique, the meaning and the aesthetics in what I do.”

Metabiótica

His best-known work, ‘Metabiótica’, is a series made for members of the public to interact with, unbeknown to them. Orion painted forms and figures on the walls of Sao Paulo and patiently waited, sometimes for months, for people to intermingle with them in interesting ways, before capturing the moments in black and white photographs.

The results are stunning – and at times dark and sublime: wings sprout from a woman’s back as she waits for the bus; a young boy is stalked by a shadowy figure with a bottle; a man appears as though about to be shot by one of Orion’s graphic protagonists.

“People feel that the photos are not real,” Orion tells me. “’How did he do it?’ I hear people asking me all the time. ‘It looks like Photoshop.’ Because it takes up to two and a half months to take the photos, it seems like Photoshop. That’s the idea, that it seems like a trick.”

Despite the set-up nature of the photos, Orion considers the most important ingredient in the work to be the unpredictable element of real life. “I have an almost sick control over the set-up of the work, but when I take the camera I lose that control completely and I just wait for whatever. Anything can happen after that and it always happens in a better way than I imagine.”

“A photo is a partial view of reality,” says Orion, whose intentions with this series included questioning the very nature of photography. “Barthes put in check the notion of reality in photography. It’s about choice and edition. It’s not real. In this series, what happens is reality, but it’s a partial vision of everything. It’s an illusion.”

Ossario

Metabiótica has received much acclaim, taking graffiti into the realm of the art gallery, the exhibition centre and the bookshop, as a beautifully produced black-and-white volume. Yet in contrast to that project’s printed permanence, another less known urban intervention, ‘Ossario’, was washed away within hours of its creation.

This piece consisted of hundreds of skulls created by rubbing soot off the walls of the Max Feffer traffic tunnel in Sao Paulo. It took 17 nights for Orion to create a work of 400 metres – including 3,500 skulls – making a gigantic intervention in the inhospitable environment.

‘Ossario’ was a reaction to the shocking amount of pollution he found in the underpass. “When they built this tunnel four years ago the original colour of the walls was yellow, and I saw that in four months it became black. I was curious. I thought it was something to do with the material the tunnel was made of. I couldn’t imagine that it was the pollution. When I realised it was, I came up with the idea of using it as my material,” he says.

The technique Orion used was ‘cleaning’: scraping off layers of grime to create his message. “In this place, you had cameras all over the tunnel so I would never use real paint on the walls, but cleaning is not a crime. So I was joking, saying I’m doing reverse graffiti, so there’s no crime involved. And it’s provocative, because they should clean and they don’t, so I do.”

The municipal authorities tried repeatedly, each night, to stop Orion from making the work, but they couldn’t legally interfere, “Cleaning is not a crime. What is a crime is the environmental damage caused by unashamed pollution,” he says.

The authorities then decided to clean the tunnel, but only washed off the part that Orion had been working on. Unfazed, he continued to create skulls, and soon found others imitating his technique in tunnels all around the city. In response, the authorities not only began to clean the tunnel every two months, but they also cleaned every other tunnel in the city.

“But they will all be dirty again in less than four months,” says Orion. “It would be better to stop polluting instead of cleaning up.”

On his website, the piece’s introductory page includes a quote from André Gorz’s book ‘The Social Ideology of the Motorcar’ that reads: “These splintered cities are sprung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says: These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here.”

‘Ossario’ articulates this urban alienation by using its forgotten, overlooked and wilfully ignored materials. Now, he wants to use those very materials to paint with, expanding the work into a bigger project called ‘Art Less Pollution’. “I’m using it as a pigment. In a way it’s an old technique – it’s charcoal, a traditional pigment – but it is really toxic and came from the car exhaust.”

Roots

Orion’s innovative approach to graffiti has come a long way since he began painting on the streets. He is part of the generation of street artists that was influenced by hip-hop culture, creating colourful freehand graffiti. This group forms a contrast to the first wave of graffiti artists in Sao Paulo, which emerged from punk culture and was characterised more by its use of stencils.

Graffiti is an international movement, and artists have always held differing philosophies about their work. “Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal,” Banksy, a British graffiti artist and one of the world’s most famous, once said. “A city where everybody could draw wherever they liked, where the street was awash with a million colours and little phrases… A city that felt like a party where everyone was invited, not just the estate agents and barons of big business.”

Orion’s view, despite his consciousness-provoking work, is slightly less idealistic. “People used to say that graffiti is a democratic art – but I don’t think so – the artist decides to do something and it’s very imposing.”

“Is graffiti political?” I ask him. “Yes, always! When you decide to do something in a public space, it’s a political act. No matter what you do, it’s political. So you have to respect that. I have to provoke people to think about something. If they hate it, I have to think about why. It’s a kind of respect. I impose, but I care about people’s opinion.”

For more information on Alexandre Orion, visit: www.alexandreorion.com.

A locked garage door is covered with a painting of a happy and multicoloured face, and has a piece of folded paper attached to the door handle. The hand written message addressed to the owner reads ‘it is a gift of art, I hope you like it’.

Graffiti isn’t a new thing; political scrawl has been found in the ruins at Pompeii alongside some unfortunate Romans, and much of the same is still in existence today. Still, if you’re one of those pedestrians who walks with their head down you probably won’t have noticed, but the walls of San Telmo are beginning to sprout some of the most fascinating art in Buenos Aires. On the corner of Perú and Chile there is a giant cat, with lamps for eyes, that has people coming out from its teeth. Then on Caseros there is a crew of four kids with oversized heads that holler and smile at you as you stroll by.

This army of abstract artwork is the endeavour of a small group of international artists who are using Buenos Aires as their canvas.

Louis D’Anjou is a 23-year-old French artist whose signature is ‘Grolou’. Louis  only came to Argentina to escape a failed relationship, and then only began painting on the street when he went to visit Chile three months ago, having previously been scared as it is viewed very negatively and punished harshly in France.

Since he started painting Buenos Aires, Louis has met others who share the movement. One such artist is Victor, or ‘El Odio’, a 21-year-old Chilean responsible for the children with oversized heads.

Despite his very ‘hip-hop’ appearance, Victor lives in flawlessly clean way. Not even caffeine passes his lips, and this lifestyle comes across in his artwork, which is seemingly innocent and childishly playful. However, unlike Louis, who works by day and asks for permission to paint a wall, Victor doesn’t ask for the space, preferring to work by night. His paintings occasionally carry strong signals, the most famous being the image of a child with a Molotov cocktail in hand.

As well as using a new style of sticking pre-made images onto walls in the same way as wallpaper, Victor’s images often carry political messages. But his smooth work is well received in the barrio and he has already achieved certain notoriety.

Victor also tags walls with his signature, something of a more brutal expression. This raw gesture takes only seconds to do, but has a powerful impact. “It is strong but dirty,” says Louis. “It generates a lot of energy in a short time.”

Victor and Louis’ network extends through Latin America; recently Pohyo and Ren, artists from Santiago, came to Buenos Aires to paint trains. Pohyo, who in Chile helped Louis through his initial experiences, tells me why it’s better in Argentina: “Here they leave the trains painted, in Chile they cover it the next day so nobody gets to see what’s there.” Train painting is dangerous however – these grafiteros break into the station with wire cutters wearing balaclavas, then have around 15 minutes before the guards revisit their route. The guards carry guns and may have dogs with them.

Louis is different however; he paints more with latex and likes to take his time. He says he doesn’t like illegal paintings as he doesn’t enjoy painting with stress, and the pleasure he gains is not from the adrenaline rush or the political fight but from the art itself, from the reactions and conversations with passers by. He calls them ‘gifts to the barrio’, whether they are welcome or not. His paintings also work as advertisements for private work, something that is beginning to take off, as people have got in touch and asked him to paint a wall in their house. He has also done hotels and office blocks, as well as selling canvases and sculptures.

Louis explained to me that in his paintings he tries to tell his life stories, but he has problems painting about sexual or sad experiences. He doesn’t want the painting to have a negative reflection, he wants the only things to be left to be the happy experiences.

As a result he is well received in the barrio, although he admits he may look like a cartonero in his paint-splattered clothes. Children love to touch his colourful images, mothers thank him for brightening up the streets and pensioners offer him coffee and hold entertaining conversations, one of his favourite parts of the day, Louis admits he doesn’t understand all of what is being said to him. In my time with him, a group of boys asked him to paint something about Boca Juniors; another passer by offered to share a joint with ‘el pintor’. 

The passion is infectious and Louis has now twice enticed all six of his housemates to spend a day painting with him, to which the corner of Finochietto and Tacuari bears testament, with six different styles blended to provide a massive painting across half the block. A Maradona figure hovers over a burning pot, in which the devil sits waiting, with the message ‘el mate mata’ (mate kills) adorned above, whilst next to it a giant head with three eyes is cradled. All of this is preceded by ones of Louis’ unmistakeable figures, presenting the artwork as a gift to the barrio.

Buenos Aires also boasts some Peruvian artists – Ceyzer, an artist who works alone in the city, as well as a group of Peruvian artists called the fumakakas, students who share the same passion for urban art and bring another style to the streets: fluorescent colours and hip hop lettering to compliment the other styles on show.

Although all of these artists point to Sao Paolo as the Latin American centre, they are proud to be associated with the beginning of Buenos Aire’s movement, even though none of them are local. Europe is intolerant of this kind of art and other locations in South America are becoming progressively filled, leaving this city as an ideal virgin canvas.

 

For more information please visit the artists’ websites: www.grolou.tk, www.elodio.tk, www.ceyzer.tk, www.graffitomag.cl 

On the corner of Plaza and Olzabal there is a park hedged on two sides by the exposed brickwork of the adjoining buildings. It’s midday in Buenos Aires, overcast, a light breeze shaking the park’s only tree. To the right of the tree, a man is standing on a crate, running a pole up and down a wall. You can barely make him out against the grey-brown building. He is not tall; he is on his tip-toes. His clothes and face are slathered in paint. A giant white circle is taking shape two storeys above him.

This diminutive, almost slight young person is Blu, one of the most innovative artists working on the streets today.

Soon his Italian friends join him. First are Ivan and Lorenzo, who are recording the experience on a video camera for the Italian film production company Mercurio. They hope to refine almost 80 hours of footage into a documentary film about a trip devoted to Blu’s painting that has taken two months and spanned Central and South America: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and now Argentina.

“We’ve come to find inspiration in the streets of Latin America,” Lorenzo tells me. 

Ivan jokes about their mission statement, saying: “We’ve got 80 hours of kids playing football and dogs fighting.”

And then there is Sibe, a gamine, a girl with short black hair and an infectious smile. She is often found reading a book in the grass while her boyfriend Blu paints.

She has watched Blu’s early graffiti in his hometown of Bologna, Italy, develop into the immense mythical figures that now distinguish his work.

Blu paints from sun up until sun down; there is an almost primordial rhythm to his work. He is finishing his piece at the park on Olzabal as dusk settles. The white circle, the head, is now attached to a body stooping towards the playground, its feet brushing the tree branches. We can only look up at Blu, who is perched on his ladder, thinking.

Marc Schiller, the founder of an urban art website called woostercollective.com, tells me that Blu is ‘a spiritual leader in the street art movement…someone who instinctively understands his surroundings’.

A boy kicks a soccer ball towards the tree and runs right into Blu and the painting. “What is it?” he asks, slightly delighted.

“What do you think?” is Blu’s provocative answer.

All of Blu’s pieces are shocking, as if the wall suddenly crept up on the person instead of the other way around. This is their peculiar power: to reinvigorate the space, to give each wall a life. In the enormous piece on Ozabal the figure kneels uncomfortably. This is a theme in Blu’s work, which, until now, appeared on walls mainly in European cities. Blu paints men, giants contorted into awkward poses, twisted so far in one direction that they’ve split apart. These bodies are almost formless—what seems to matter is not the figure but this moment of breakage when all the demons come spilling out.

Blu paints humans who have lost control of their own bodies. In one picture, on a wall in Zaragoza, Spain, a corpse-white man unravels his intestines into the shape of heart. In another, in Genoa, a giant man has peeled off his face to reveal a hollow grooved interior out of which smaller men struggle to climb. Rib cages become prison bars. Eyes become headlights. For Blu the human body is a kind of malfunctioning machine. It excretes and regurgitates and defecates. It breaks down—it is prone to decay. This makes his work, with its tendency towards the grotesque, immediately recognisable.

The notion that humans are autonomous or somehow self-contained is exactly the illusion street art seeks to shatter. Painting becomes a communal activity. Women carrying groceries stop to ask questions. Games of football start. Local artists from Doma TV stop by to swap ideas. The police show up.  Blu relishes these interruptions. He says they are the reason he makes art in the street. 

A few days later I start to understand what he means. Blu is creating one of his most striking paintings at a vacant lot on Holmberg in Belgrano. It is also one of his largest, stretching the entire length of the building, almost half a city block. In the image a giant man, lying on his back, has parts of his body cut away, exposing a kind of enormous indoor city. The whole neighbourhood is suddenly different. The dogs are barking. A woman strides onto the patch of grass where Blu is working. “What is this?” she asks, almost frantically. “Is it a factory?”

“I’m just the artist,” Blu offers with an impish grin.

The picture draws every conceivable type. A group of construction workers are standing on the corner. They’re smiling with their arms folded. “I don’t know much about art,” one says, “but I like it a lot.” An elderly nun pats my head. A man with wild white hair yells something from a moving car.

Ronald Kennedy, a retired architect, is using the occasion to lecture his nephew about the nature of art. “It looks like a train station. The little men inside are the big one’s friends,” says the 11-year-old. “It’s very good,” he adds, and then after an emphatic pause, “the picture has movement.”  The adults burst out laughing.

To paint on a wall in Latin America is never an innocent act. The wall is a place for political slogans. It is the surface against which partisans are shot. Even Blu’s work, which is not obviously political, draws strangers together. “This type of thing would never have been possible under the dictatorship,” explains Ronald.

The danger involved in painting walls underscores the fact that Blu is not a normal artist: Blu is an artist on the run. Running between the rooftops, above our heads. He is stretching out on a ladder to reach a high wall or crouching on an electrical crate to reach a low wall. He does not ask permission. He simply paints. “To do something without asking permission…it’s a way of expressing yourself,” he tells me.

In the countries they’ve visited in Latin America, the difference between legal and illegal art is less clear than in Europe. “In Guatemala and Mexico City we were more concerned about tagging over gang graffiti than with the police.”  In the end the streets welcomed them; the murals they made with local artists and street kids in places like San Jose, Costa Rica, attest to the lasting impact of their trip.

When they arrived in Buenos Aires, their final stop, Blu noticed the walls first. This is how he experiences a new city. He skips the monuments and museums, the wide pedestrian thoroughfares; he looks instead for the dingy remainders, the points at which the city falls apart.

“How are the walls in Buenos Aires different from those in other cities you’ve visited?” I ask. Each city, he says, has completely different walls.

“In Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the walls are very low because an earthquake razed the city in 1972. But street art adapts to these circumstances. Nicaragua has a ton of artists working in the street.” In Guatemala—a richer country—it is too dangerous. Walls are not used for painting. “And Buenos Aires itself?”  Blu gestures up at his painting on Holmberg. “Take this wall,” he says. “I am attracted to it because it is complex; it has a history. A building was destroyed to create this wall.” He draws my attention to an old porthole window that is now the giant reclining man’s eye. “This window is ancient. They aren’t made anymore. This was the starting point for the piece.”

When asked if his work is a kind of collaboration with the pre-existing structure, he answers: “Yes and no. Because in a sense each wall already tells the whole story, it’s all there, I only happen upon it.” Each time he finds a wall it is an accident, a completely fortuitous event. In Europe things are kept tidy for the tourists. But in Buenos Aires these walls that bear their scars on the surface are still waiting to be discovered.

When Blu finds his wall he improvises. There are no plans. Yet as his painting becomes more intricate, as the arms and legs and head take shape, it begins to look as if it had always been there. It is too gigantic for this stooping garrulous man to have painted. At most he’s colouring in. He could be the man hired to paint over the graffiti.

The picture resurfaces the wall, the wall resurfaces. Porteños walk past their block on Holmberg as if for the first time.

In a quiet moment, sipping a beer, Lorenzo, Sibe and Ivan stop to consider whether the giant man on Holmberg is done. Blu is there too. He is serene, very quiet. He not only understands these walls, he wants us to change the way we inhabit them. In this sense his art inherits its aspirations from the modernist avant-gardes. It seizes on their notion that art might alter and reorder everyday life in the city for the better.

Today you need a ticket to see the Surrealists. But Blu’s work will never get lost in the museum. His art shares the same fate as the wall—it will live and die on the street.

For more information on Blu’s work visit www.blublu.org