Paulo Nimer Pjota used to be a graffiti artist on the streets of his native São Paulo, and you can definitely see the influence in his paintings. Not that his works resemble tags or burners. But the way that he arranges various images and marks across his supports – either large, upstretched sheets of canvas or battered sheets of metal – has a kind of ad hoc, free-for-all, inchoate vibe, like a wall that’s been randomly scribbled on.
Splats of paint, crayon flurries, scratches and other jittery inscriptions mix with more recognisable imagery, from comic book quotations to detailed depictions of oriental vases or Native American masks. It’s a stylistic hodgepodge, a stew of high and low cultural references – although, in arraying Greco-Roman style pots and resin casts of plastic bottles on the floor beneath each painting, he perhaps emphasises this idea a little too forcefully.