Brazilian artist Alexandre Orion began his pursuits as a teenage graffiti artist in the streets of Sao Paulo City. Now, in his late twenties, Orion experiments with combining his street art and his fascination with photography... a process he calls Metabiotica. He expresses his stencil style art on the walls of the city and then incorporates interaction with live subjects to create a new photographic image... some staged, some merely recorded. Coming from the Brazilian tradition of pichacao* with its simple, bold and black line lettering, he translates this unique street language into a new art form all its own. His urban inventions not only create something visually arresting but deftly capture moments of suspense, terror, joy and plain surreality.
*São Paulo, the economic capital of Brazil, is home to a unique and unprecedented writing movement known as ‘pichação’. The Brazilian word for tag, literally meaning ‘trace’ or ‘stain’, Pichação first appeared in its current form in the streets during the mid-1980s, and since 1990 has gradually colonised the façades and tops of a variety of buildings in the capital reaching a climax in the second half of the 1990s. The São Paulo milieu is unique because, unlike most other American, European and even Asian graffiti scenes, which reproduce New York letterforms more or less faithfully, the pichações have developed a totally different imaginary calligraphy.
