Walking down Rua Cardeal Arcoverde, at the gateway to the bar-and-restaurant-mecca of Vila Madalena in Sao Paulo, I stumble upon artistic traditions, old and new. I’ve been this way before, and enjoyed the street art along a roughly-built brick wall flanking a car parking site.
Street art, Cardeal Arcoverde …
As so often in Sao Paulo, the open space is fleeting, temporary. Car parking is a way of making real estate cover its costs until you can make it really pay, by building an apartment block on it.
… now under black paint, and the building demolished
The street art may have been superceded, but something catches my eye. I’d noticed a form of street art recently which had made me smile – images on paper flyposted to the street wall. It seemed appropriate, given the subject.
Rua Teodoro Sampaio – see also http://theproverbial.org/2012/05/26/cockraoches-again
Here was a whole nest of such images – maybe this was from where the other had migrated, or was I seeing a new trend emerging?
Xilo Shirt shopfront, Rua Cardeal Arcoverde, Sao Paulo
‘Xilo print’ is Portugenglish for woodcut print. From this shopfront a group of artists produce and sell printed T-shirts, prints on paper, and printed canvas bags and cushion covers. Blocks are cut by hand into MDF (medium density fibre-board) and stored in racks in the shop – they print a shirt while you wait. The images are cultural icons – musicians, artists, actors, cinema characters, signs and symbols, the ever-present sexual images. Old blocks are built into the decor of the shop. And they offer woodcut printing classes.
There are originals for sale too, mixed media on paper, displayed hanging by bulldog clips from nails in the wall. High art appears among the cultural icons, from Leonardo to Magritte. I mention the now-obliterated art across the street, and I’m told that the harlequin figure – see above – was by a Spanish artist. These folk care about their art, and they make it pay too.
Creative quarter, Vila Madalena
What’s more, Xilo Shirt is in a little cluster of original clothing shops, all decorated in the distinctive manner of Brazilian street art while blending seamlessly with the ‘native’ graffiti. A car mechanic’s wall next door sports a colourful satirical piggy bank next to a blue octopus with a manic grin. .
Pig and octopus
The combination of outspoken visual brio and entrepreneurial energy strikes me as characteristically Brazilian. You sense the huge potential of the culture, especially when you consider the country’s immediate economic prospects.
What was less expected was a glimpse of the past. Further down Cardeal, there’s a basement shop which has always intrigued me. It’s a jumble of furniture, architectural fragments, light fittings, bric-a-brac and the odd painting, but I hadn’t seen it open before. The door was open, so I made my way down a sloping walkway with inset steps – like the entrance to a tavern cellar – and spent an intriguing half hour with the occupants and their wares.
Carved marble cartouche at the altar, Catedral da Sé
Turns out they are restorers of antiques, hence the varied jumble. They make objects to order too – a resin Egyptian sarcophagus for someone’s birthday celebration – and carve plaster moulds for novelty figurines. Incredibly dusty, this Aladdin’s cave gave me a glimpse of another Vila Madalena, a fine arts workshop. I recall that it’s said that the craftsmen and women working on the Sao Paulo cathedral in the 1920s lived in Madalena. Like planets aligning, the pull of the area became clearer. I saw the street art from a longer perspective.
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