Paulo Nimer Pjota was 15 when he sold his first painting and already a three-year veteran. “I don’t really know what life is like without painting,” the 37-year-old Brazilian artist tells me. “It is in everything I do, the movies that I watch, the books that I read. They might not have anything to do with art, but I can find something in them that I might be able to use.”
Pjota’s studio, which once served as his bedsit before he got married and had a son, is in a quiet neighbourhood of São Paulo: there are shelves lined with gourds, skulls, postcards and other trinkets, a pair of skateboards hang on the wall and a desk overflows with tubes of paint. A pile of sketches he made when he was a teenager, discovered at his parents’ house, sit among this productive clutter.
We catch up over the phone as he travels to install his first UK institutional show at South London Gallery. Titled Encantados (Enchanted), it will feature 11 new paintings on canvas, hung against a vast and intricate wall drawing. The stretched works depict witchy and fantastical scenes, the surface imbued with a sense of shimmer in its layers of acrylic, oil and tempera.
In one painting, pink butterflies burst from a woman’s stomach; in another, a monkey picks over a fallen urn. Gods, fish and huge blooming bouquets of flowers recur. Pjota, dressed in skateware and covered in tattoos, likens his process to a hip-hop producer, sampling imagery and motifs from sources that include ancient civilisations, Brazilian folklore, art history, exercise books and children’s literature.
“Mythology has always been interesting to me,” he says. “Stories I heard in my parents’ house, in the media, these things form a big part of our life from a very young age. Becoming a father myself I started reading a lot of fables to my son and I was looking back on the drawings I used to make when I was a kid. Crazy animals, anthropomorphised nature.”
In The Land Before Time for Jorge, two cacti appear, one crying, one laughing, like the masks of Greek tragedy, except their faces have the characteristics of ancient Japanese warriors. Pjota says the landscape in the background comes from a 15th-century painting about the colonial invasion of the Americas and a barely robed canoodling couple in the background is taken from a French tapestry. “I made this painting for my son. The title references the film, which everyone in Brazil watched as children.”
The wall painting in London, which will feature a menagerie of creatures playing musical instruments, is a callback to his own youth amid the graffiti and hip-hop scene of São José do Rio Prêto, his hometown in the countryside of São Paulo state. Pjota started making art after attending the local hip-hop school, a kind of social club offering breakdance, DJing and graffiti classes in an otherwise conservative city devoid of much cultural diversion.
“I started a crew with two friends, and then started another crew with the teachers of the school. I was this 13-year-old boy spraying with these 25-year-old guys. This is how I met all these star graffiti artists: Os Gêmeos, Ise, Nunca. It was super fun, super raw, the beginning of Brazilian graffiti.” That first sale came from a community project at the local office of PT, the Workers’ Party. “Hip-hop and street culture, it’s about revolution and community.”
He was attracted to using brushes as much as the spray can and developed his own style, painting both on the walls of the city and on canvas at home. “I messed around with different graffiti styles: throw-ups, wildstyle, but soon I started to develop my own thing, very different from what else was going on.”
Aged 17 he moved to São Paulo to attend art college, but his friends were still the older guys he had met on the streets. “The graffiti scene was harder here. There were more police, who were a lot more brutal and I wasn’t a kid any more.” His first exhibition at São Paulo gallery Mendes Wood DM, in 2012, featured far larger paintings than he is making now, his motifs such as crabs, crystals and anatomical drawings, equally diverse but rendered floating and discrete from each other on an otherwise monochrome surface – as they might coexist on a graffitied wall. Other works were made on sheets of scrap metal or old found textiles. He says there is a stronger sense of narrative to the latest work. “The symbols intersect in a more subtle way,” he says. The juxtapositions are no long the purpose of the work. “They are a tool for constructing a new mythical and fantastical universe.”