José Augusto Amaro Capela (São Paulo, SP, 1971). Graffiti artist and photographer. He is recognized for his graphic interventions in the color blue ⎼ called flops ⎼, made mainly on internal walls of underground rainwater galleries and sewage outlets, as well as on buildings and sidewalks in the city of São Paulo.
Born and raised in the city center, he is influenced by several urban cultural manifestations: in his youth he participates in punk movements, joins hip-hop groups, and becomes a skateboarder. Before starting his career in the arts, he worked as a motorcycle courier, which allowed him to follow the dynamics of graffiti in the city. A skateboarding accident forces him to abandon the sport and stimulates him to graffiti in 1995 [1].
Zezão begins to graffiti using a small foam roller and black latex paint. His style resembles that of the crews, groups of graffiti writers who created their own style in São Paulo: vertical letters inspired by gothic heavy metal bands' album covers. His initial inscriptions are "Come Lixo", but he later signs his name "VICIO" when he joined a group of graffiti artists in the late 1990s. He also uses the inscriptions "PIF" (Pintores Infratores Ferroviários), "FDS" (Foda-se), and "DST" (consonants in the word "destroy").
Motivated by his graffiti artist friend Binho (1971), he begins to draw, and in 1998, contact with the work of the American artist Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) stimulates him to create more abstract works. Zezão began to conduct formal experiments in isolated places so as not to compete for space, to prevent his work from being covered by other graffiti artists, and to escape police repression. The first experiments take place in the Moinho Matarazzo factory building in the Brás neighborhood, built in the early 20th century and abandoned since the 1970s.
The style of his painting in this phase is a multicolor, abstract composition, created with leftover spray cans donated by graffiti friends. The lack of paint of the same color leads Zezão to create gradients in the composition in order to take advantage of all the available material. The procedure gives the image a smoky, psychedelic effect-that is why he calls the style psychedelic, although it is also known as fumacinhas (little smokes). With time and more resources, Zezão improves them by making them more technical and colorful.
In the 2000s, in the underground galleries of the city's sewage system, he starts to paint the design pattern for which he is recognized: the flop. The new style, which standardizes elements of his typographic research, consists of a single, variable shape composed of one or more straight or curved lines that generally become more sinuous at the ends. The dark blue outline highlights the light blue fill of the shape, which stretches on a vertical or horizontal axis, or takes on a circular appearance. Some of the materials used-a small foam roller and latex paint-come from his graffiti days, but now Zezão uses solvent-based acrylic spray paint.
The flop is initially painted on the walls of rain gutters, along the concrete banks of the Tietê River, and around pipes, manhole covers, and grates. The underground environment draws the artist's attention for having spaces of great proportion, in which he realizes that the dialogue between his visual intervention and the chosen environment-with volumes created by piling up garbage over time-demands a site specific projects.
In the early 2000s, his work gained visibility on the Internet with the help of the Lost Art website [2] and the social media Fotolog, in which he published photos of his works. Although he initially used photography to document his interventions, over time he incorporates aesthetic premises to it, such as framing, light, and architectural perspective.
In 2004, one of Zezão's works are shown in the group show Calaveras. Promoted by Choque Cultural, the first gallery specializing in street art in Brazil, the event exhibits works by graffiti artists, comic artists, and tattoo artists. In 2005, the same gallery held the artist's first solo exhibition, Subterrâneos, which brought together photographs of his interventions in the city.
Representing artists from Choque Cultural, Zezão participates in 2006 in the Fortes Vilaça na Choque Cultural [3] exhibitions. He contributes to the event with a painting that leads the visitor to the interior of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, as well as a wall painting and a series of photos of his flops. The repercussion of the event in the press and the expressive visitation draw the attention of curators and generated other shows in museums and cultural centers which exhibited Zezão's work[4].
With the group show Ruas de São Paulo: a Survey of Brazilian Street Art from São Paulo (2007), organized by Choque Cultural at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York, the artist gained international projection. In the following years he exhibited in cultural institutions in Europe, such as Brasilea, in Switzerland. It promoted the solo exhibition Zezão (2013).
Zezão continues to make interventions in the city of São Paulo and abroad, and became an important agent for the dissemination of graffiti art and its maintenance in the arts circuit.
Notes
1 Although he does both pichações (street writing) and graffiti (drawings), Zezão usually sees the two types of work as one, associating them to the same concept of "transgression.
2. The website Lost Art, from the São Paulo photographer duo Ignacio Aronovich (1969) and Louise Chin (1971), hosts an online photographic collection of São Paulo's graffiti scene and graffiti artists' contacts.
3. The event consists of an exchange of artists representing Choque Cultural, an emerging gallery focused on street art, and Fortes Vilaça, a traditional art gallery from São Paulo. which in 2016 will become Fortes D'aloia & Gabriel. On one side, artists such as Zezão, Fefê Talavera (1979) and Rafael Highraff (1977) produce unpublished works for Fortes; on the other side, artists such as Vik Muniz (1961), Beatriz Milhazes (1960) and Leda Catunda (1961) create exclusive works for Choque. The exhibition is one of the contributions to the insertion of graffiti in the art system.
4. Some examples of these exhibitions are Spray: The New Latin American Muralism (2006), held at the Memorial da América Latina; Fabulosas Desordens (2007), at Caixa Cultural Rio de Janeiro; and De Dentro Para Fora e De Fora Para Dentro (2011), at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).
ZEZÃO . In: ENCICLOPÉDIA Itaú Cultural de Arte e Cultura Brasileiras. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2021. Available at: <http://enciclopedia.itaucultural.org.br/pessoa437174/zezao>. Accessed on: June 26, 2021. Encyclopedia entry. ISBN: 978-85-7979-060-7