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Credit: Mark Rifkin , february 2007

Presented in collaboration with Brazil’s Choque Cultural Gallery, “Ruas de São Paulo” features the innovative work of eight Brazilian street artists, all of whom were brought to New York – many for the first time –not only to participate in the installation but also to create new pieces, some painted directly on the wall -- temporary murals that will be painted over at the end of the exhibition. While several recent gallery and museum shows focusing on graffiti and street art have met with varying degrees of success—this kind of art is best seen, of course, outside, within the community that helped shape it, as a way of taking back public space and not as merchandise—Boleta, Fefê, Highraff, Kboco, Onesto, Speto, Titi Freak, and Zezão have managed to re-create much of that ever-changing environment without compromising their vision. Kboco’s Por*Arriba series consists of altered advertising images framed and hung side by side, while a fanciful chair juts out of a wall. Speto’s large spray-painted portraits practically come alive. Yo-yo expert Titi Freak incorporates his Japanese heritage into stunning mixed-media works, some made on pieces of wood he found in New York City and elsewhere; the elegant “Drink,” the complex “Gold, and the hard-edged “Black Man” are drawn on parts of a sake bottle box. Boleta’s fantastical pieces are more psychedelic, with a Gothic feel; his brand-new, wild, multicolored mural dominates one room in the gallery, nearby his “Ironing Board,” “Snake Sword,” and “White Skull.” Onesto, who studied with the great Os Gemeos, paints a stable of odd, cartoonish characters, both on canvas and climbing the walls of the gallery, like Charles Addams on shrooms. Highraff includes colorful shrooms in his Lewis Carroll-like fairy-tale wonderland that includes three-dimensional sculptures. A DVD shows Zezão at work beneath the streets of São Paulo, working on his abstract forms that sometimes recall fractals or micro-organisms and his unique iconographic alphabet. Finally, the sole woman in the show, Fefê, contributes her Paul Klee-like mixed-media works on scratchboard, a menagerie of cool animals such as a cow, a unicorn, a rabbit, and various “monsters.” She has also installed a huge, site-specific letter monster whose tail wraps around the back hallway.