Going under Sewage system art!
It is Sunday morning and a man in yellow overalls is feeling his way through a seemingly endless underground maze. Rats keep him company as he pushes on, spray can in hand, leaving an army of crushed cockroaches in his wake. The fading sound of trundling trucks and cars are a subtle reminder of the world that lives and breathes up above; the world of men. But here, in the bowels of Sao Paulo, home to almost twenty million people, it is the pests that rule – them and the subterranean art of Zezao.
Jose Augusto Amaro Capela, aka Zezao, is a thirty-six-year-old graffiti artist from Sao Paulo, Brazil. For almost a decade he has used the sewage system of this overpopulated metropolis as the canvas for his spray-painted art. His trademark work is an abstract, complex and curvilinear shape; lonely, floppy and always blue.
Zezao started painting as a teenager. His first canvases were the trains and buses of the city he then loathed. “At the beginning, as an angry kid, my work was more vandalism than art,” he admits. “I’d graffiti the subway trains a lot. It was a way to seek revenge against a city from which I felt excluded.”
Then, in 1999, everything changed. His dad had just died, his mother was ill and, as a bike courier, he made barely enough to support himself, let alone his ailing mum. “The situation at home was desperate,” he says. “I was depressed and needed to find a place to reflect and try to figure things out.”
That place was the sewage system. On a hot summer day, walking down one of the busiest roads in town, he noticed an open sewage cap and, curious, decided to look inside. The rest, as they say, is history. “I liked what I saw,” says Zezao. “These are dirty, forgotten places. I didn’t need visibility and preferred to spend time there than up on the surface.”
In seven years, Zezao has painted his trademark ‘blue flop’ in more than twenty underground ‘galleries’ across Sao Paulo. “At the time, my friends would ask, ‘Zezao, why did you stop painting?’ And I’d say, ‘I haven’t stopped. In fact, I’m painting a lot more than you are.’ Then I’d pull out the photos of my work and they’d be totally blown away.”
Besides its obvious political theme (“I see the environmental tragedy caused by human waste from up close”), Zezao’s work also carries a strong sense of adventure. Traipsing through the labyrinthine sewage system of a huge city on your own can be scary enough. But what if you get lost? “My torch ran out of batteries once and I was suddenly enveloped by total, absolute darkness. Down there, cell phones don’t work and I started to yell from the top of my lungs but no one could hear me. It was like a horror film, really frightening.” And then there’s the downpour that sent water levels rising, almost drowning him in the process: “The water came up to my waist, kept rising and then, when I finally found the way out, I couldn’t get to it, as rubbish bags, pieces of wood and rats were tumbling in my direction and blocking my way. It was like a tsunami down there!”
Zezao’s work has finally caught the attention of art galleries both in Brazil and abroad. Earlier this year, his work was shown at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York. One of his paintings graced the back cover of Graffiti Brasil, a book published by Thames & Hudson. And more work is currently on display at Sao Paulo’s Contemporary Arts Museum, as well as the O Contemporary gallery in Brighton, England, which shows art from the likes of Dface and Damien Hirst.
Zezao admits that the main challenge is to exhibit in a way that credibly reflects his work on the street. “My art is inherently tied to the dirt and grit; it doesn’t make sense to use canvases,” says Zezao, who will only exhibit paintings on structures found in Sao Paulo’s sewage. “I want to create an atmosphere that reflects the real underground gallery where most of my work is. The sewage system is a spectacular backdrop – the waterfalls of brown water, the odd spot of outside light, the dead animal. I want to show a side of the city that no one ever sees.”
Check out Zezao’s work at the O Contemporary Gallery in Brighton. For more info, see www.artesubterranea.com.
This story originally appeared in Huck #008.
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