The trajectory of graffiti in Brazil and its insertion in the universe of contemporary art owes, in part, its success to a group of artists from São Paulo of the 80s with marked style. More than that, this generation has advanced and aware of its role, it has formed an artistic circuit of its own. Tinho is one of those names. The work of this artist as part of a generation aware of his artistic role is to assume that the production of graffiti is a poetic strategy of knowledge of the city itself and with courage to assume this field of dissonant polyphonic forces.

We can observe in his production the active conscience and the conscious performance of the artist who does nothing less and assumes the importance of the production of São Paulo graffiti for the Brazilian scene. The graffiti gains contours of lucid criticism and develops as a knowledge program of the city itself, from a precise, insistent and unmediated contact with the urban territory. It is with this universe that Tinho establishes an intelligent dialogue with the history of art, a resource of his academic formation, when he uses visual arguments to develop his artistic research, such as collage, performance and investment in marked textures. But it produces a kind of conversion of meaning, a short circuit when it invades the canvas and replaces the plane with the context, the rational occupation with collage, where fury and delicacy, anguish and naivety, martyrdom and seduction coexist. He elaborates this sonic visuality with great precision when proposing a look-listen to his works.

The multiplication of forms and plastic investments spell out his research and his visual enterprises that scream, articulate but do not lose the commitment made by his generation to speak on behalf of the city that it is and that one wants to denounce his problems, to strike out his oppression , advance over its borders, risk other ways.

The solidity of Tinho's work lies in two striking plastic factors - the perpetuation of the action on the streets as a creative, poetic and productive dynamic and the strategy of figuration as an invitation to the passerby's gaze. The artist advances in his research and dialogues with the collage, reconfiguring the intelligent debate about support, medium and presence in a logic of occupation that is commanded by the excess of truculence, power, money and consumption.

The visual vocabulary used by the artist is the resource of a discourse on urban ethos, so striking in São Paulo, a topology where forms are invented but not for that reason strayed from an objective symbolic function. Full of references, the artist constantly calls this urban and chaotic being, involves the subject and demands participation when dealing with the agenda of the day.

Charbelly Estrella