Amaro Abreu

Meet Brazilian artist Amaro Abreu, a free spirited human being who opens up his thoughts with us on pretty much everything.

-What would you like to drink? Coffee, Tea, Beer, Soda or something else?
I like to drink water, but also wine and juice I have preference.

-Introduce yourself to us – as if we had no idea who you were!
I am a person dedicated intensely to painting, but I don’t wish to limit my mind only to drawing. Our brain was made to be expanded, not atrophied, and imagination walks to the horizon when it is open to find infinite possibilities. I hope to absorb all life around me and all things around in literature, music and movies that have quality to be more expressive as i make my existential passage.

– Where does your (tag) Artist name come from?
My name Amaro, is a tribute to an indigenous leader whos called Tupac Amaru and lived in Peru, who did a great manifestation of freedom against the Spanish colonization, in the 16th century. It’s my name and my artist name to paintings.

-How do you define yourself and why? Artist? Street artist? Something else?
Always when somebody asks me this, I think that a definition would limit myself. I am an artist because people need a way to share ideas and I use paint to put it into practice. Life is a great imagination that no one can live without death. Everybody can perceive death everyday and almost every one is thinking that their experience of life is more intense than others, or sometimes thinking that their life is less than others. We create this illusion to survive and it is impulse to productions that can be in any stimuli that you know how to reuse creatively. I think the best way to define myself is to put something small about my worldview. Below is a text I wrote about death and of course about life:

As far as the fantastic laws of nature are concerned, we can see death as its masterpiece, for a sharper sensation; as its most expressive melody developed, to an unconditional logic. It sounds rather dismal this vibration suspended in a permanent young atmosphere, with its infinite mysteries to be traced. However, in the reference to love – comprehensive human creation of the most acute feelings – there is a perception of ephemeral, where we, passengers of old memories, are searching for something new and naming everything and everyone for communication, but also in the tireless attempt to never erase the individual past and the whole past. Nothing like seeing death through glass, with its serious expression, with its ocean gaze, perceiving that it will only be presented to you in an uncertain future; nothing like touching it with your fingertips to rekindle every dormant cell. It is intriguing to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, the nostalgia of the aroma, the visual journey, the sound emotion, the melancholy of the rain, the harmony of colours, the heavenly dance, the secret of the flower … but to know all these stimuli, being endurable, subject to constant renewal. Curious is the memories seem more intense than the moment itself. It is interesting to grasp the force of an instant, knowing that it is a strong instant because happen before death. Freedom is to have the conviction – at least once – that it was worth it, that the soul is not small, and that there is no possibility of getting trapped in abyssal solitude. Death is the great dictator and the most democratic. It does not allow carrying material goods, but gives everyone the need of memories. It causes all to fear but, even unconsciously, it is unanimous in social opinion. It makes ambiguous personalities and ultimately unifies any existence. It forces everyone to die, but gives everyone the wish to live. Death is the search for meaning and the creator of incessant doubts. Death is platonic love and it is an affective relationship. It is life and it is death.

– How did it all start for you, and what is it nowadays?
I always had a fascination to drawings. For me it is an orgasm when I can be inside a world that only exists in an image. But, when I moved from my neighborhood to downtown of Porto Alegre-Brazil, I started to see urban art and started to like it. After, I never left it out of my life. Nowadays, I can work with art and this gives me enormous pleasure because I am not a prisoner of myself, working on something that does not make sense to me or seeing life passing through the window.

-What is the first thing you do when you get up in the morning?
I almost always take a glass of water.

-Street art is mostly a visually stimulating form of art. To add one more sense to it, what music would you pick to accompany your art work?
I don’t like to listen to music when Im painting. Music touches my feelings intensely but when I’m painting I prefer to listen to the sounds around me.

-In all forms of art, inspiration is crucial. What inspires you and how does that end up in your art?
What inspires me is all the experiences I have but what transpires is the creation of a civilization that is developed in another atmosphere, with the notion of evolution not related to technology, but to intimately contact nature. I use the stimuli of animals, landscapes and plants of our planet to recreate other forms of life in a purest natural state, different from what we have today, contaminated by urbanization and egocentrism. This planet would be in a very high degree of evolution, but the constructions and forms of stratifications of nature is much less aggressive with the planet they live on and the ways of living walk in a much more harmonious way.

-What is the hardest part while working on a piece of art?
Nowadays I never work with sketch and always try to put something challenging. Always make a great effort for each piece of art to put an innovative element. So every job for me is a suspense like I’m doing it for the first time. This is very productive, because each work comes out different and always dumb several times in the course of the creations. At the end comes something unforeseen, bringing me a great load of endorphin. I have a desire to always create something new, not allowing myself to repeat an image and always forcing myself to create something more innovative than I created for the last time. I think it would be a sin for the artist to give himself to the precariousness of the repetition of previously reproduced forms. I enjoy preaching surprise to viewers, who are often waiting for me to do something and create something completely new and breaking with expectations. My creative process involves never ceasing to evolve and each work create something challenging that will allow me not to stagnate in time and space.

-Do you have any artist(s) you admire? Can you pinpoint what it is that makes them so special for you?
There are several artists that I like but I prefer not to mention any of them, letting anyone who observes try to find the relation.

-Which cities are the most inspiring for you as an artist?
With the globalized world you can go to any city by internet or television. Of course the experience going to places is much stronger. I love to travel, not as a tourist, but making connections with local people and getting more time in each place. This greatly expanded the creation, but I do not have a specific city or country for inspiration.

-What other passions do you have apart from art?
Music, literature and movies. I think the better your personal and ideological training, the more expressive you will do your pieces.

-Do you have a special project that you hope to achieve some day?
I’m starting to get more into the animation universe and I have a dream to create something. I already have a script, but I’m still waiting to find a producer of my interest and the ideal moment.

-Tell us a bit more about your art; does it include symbolisms, messages or repeated patterns? How has it evolved?
I talked a little bit about a previous question but now I will go to talk more. When I began to search a way that going find an conversation with my soul and that had visual identity, I was in direction to a parallel universe. Since when I am child I had the desire to know life on another planet. We are with high technology but the only way to cross border between the curiosity and mystery of the stars, it´s the imagination. But I did not like the way the movies or magazines explored it. Always redundantly, with green beings, with large heads and eyes. So, I started to create my own beings with characteristics different from those already explored millions of times. I did several drafts to find a way when I would be satisfactory to myself and during a some years I don’t find something that I really like. After a time of maturity I was doing the lines of the face (marking lines for eye, nose and mouth design) like I always did and I see that lines is better for my visual identity. So I started not to delete and use the lines at the completion of the works. After I was enjoying it but I don’t satisfy with only it and I thought it very superficial and monotonous. Then I began to enter into a process of observation of plants, animals and landscapes to leave more intense the visual trip to this planet that was creating. I was recreating all the visual stimuli that fell to my eyes and when I saw it was emerging in a completely new universe. It seemed like a fleeting dream that my imagination would put out and then I would come back to reality. Often, this creative effort to find the aesthetic of the drawing that appealed to me, gave me a sense of mental and physical exhaustion. But after completing a job satisfactorily he felt an enormous sense of pleasure. This planet, as it was said, is in total alignment with nature and life that inhabits it has very advanced knowledge regarding the environment. I represent this through drawings with a minimum of intervention technological objects that can interfere with the natural course of an ecosystem and degrade the faun and flora of the place. In addition there are many other subtleties and messages that if I tell you everything will not be fun for the viewer to discover and make their own interpretations.

– How long time does your art work, on walls, usually survive for?
This is impossible to say because there are jobs that have lasted a day and jobs that are alive during the year.

-What do you think, people feel or think of, when they see one of your works on the street?
I thing that the first impression is that you are on different planet but after the more complex interpretations I don’t know because this is peculiar, being related to very subjective personal experiences. The art works with unconscious, the painter tries to pass a more remarkable message but the plots that the mind does are in the world and not in the artist’s hand.

-What are your creative plans for the future?
Keep creating in a non-repetitive way but rather challenging and surprising for the people who accompany my work. Continue making trips to make paintings, participate in projects and publicize my work. Make an animation with my creations.

-Is there a little wish you have that not many people know about?
I am a little dreamy and have many desires but I like to reveal at the right time so that my word has credibility. I value a lot for the harmony between speech and practice that can only be done without so many words in the wind and more with action together with strong ideology.

-Is there a specific thought or message you would like to pass to our audience out there?
I think most of the messages that I would like to pass were stated in the interview, but I thank very much ‘I support street art’ team for the space of dissemination and propagation of ideas of the artists.

Thank you! It’s been great to get to know more about the mind and person behind such talented and inspiring works.

‘’I Support Street Art’’ team.