In 1994, invited by Argentine Alfredo Segatori, graffiti artists Binho, Tinho, Gêmeos, Speto and Vitché ended up in Buenos Aires and from there they would begin the discipline of searching for a Brazilian art that brought them to the present trip. In this stay in Argentina, Tinho has contact with puppets and begins to paint cloth dolls on the walls of Buenos Aires. At the time, radicalizing the marginality of graffiti, he was not satisfied with the popularity and easy acceptance of puppets and chose to work with the aesthetics of marginalized dolls in Brazilian culture: the voodoo.

 

In the current series, Walter Nomura works with fabrics that are either donated or found in urban regions where they accumulate, as industrial remnants of clothing or as clothes used and dispensed in places around the world. As in Belarus, where he was recently, installing almost a ton of used clothing at the Center for Contemporary Art in Minsk.

 

Still with regard to the dimension of the symbolic, in his current works, Tinho presents in a complex way a speech of the affections that migrate in these clothes belonging to someone and that become anonymous costumes and rags of individuals from different crowds and ways of life within the cultures he travels through performing his street art. And in the multitude of anonymous he represents, there is a contradictory curious side when, by the power of the language of painting, he universalizes in the figure of the puppets, the individuals and affections of contemporary culture that go from anonymous to identifiable, extolling a collectivity of isolated individuals and approximated by the state of loneliness in today's world.

 

In other words, Tinho's work, conceived in symbolic, material and conceptual terms, points out that original art as the art he achieved is and makes art indivisible under any historical and post-historic module, because he is no longer on the horizon of discussion between what is and is not art within the graffiti generation. The “Cloth Dolls” series puts him on issues inherent to art and in a way that, surprisingly, because he is giving this message through the definitive overcoming between street art and painting, points out that the philosophy of painting's death has just ended. die. The street painting of which he is the central author in Brazilian art, has just reinvented modern painting, overcoming the failures of the Old World and giving an urgent meaning to makers and thinkers that contemporary Brazilian art no longer depends on submissions to new technologies to exist on the planetary scene.

Saulo di Tarso

visual artist and curator