Keeping Xabregas real
➔ Ricardo Passaporte
An outspoken fan of the 1980s graffiti movement and of outsider art, Ricardo’s artwork is not necessarily motivated by a need to convey political messages. “Of course I have political views about a number of things around me. But I’m not an institutional artist and my work is not openly political. I’m motivated by painting. I simply like to paint”, he says. But it’s not all fun and games, he says: “Now focused on other sources of inspiration, he describes painting as not all fun and games: “sometimes I have to bang my head against the wall”.
Almost ten years into his career, and after becoming a dad, it’s only natural he doesn't go out so much to paint graffiti. But the unpretentious aesthetics are very much present in his body of work.
With a creative process that often involves painting over images he collects from the internet or drawings made by others, he sparked some controversy earlier in his career with a series where pop culture symbols and logos from consumer brands such as Lidl, Tesco, and IKEA, or a fat Bart Simpson look alike, casually appeared in his compositions, under his name or as a member of the Germes Gang collective.
Postmodern, but still standing
Remember when shopping malls started to spring up everywhere around our cities? Lisbon was no exception. Centro Comercial Tejo opened to the public in 1980, right in the middle of Xabregas [one of Beato’s neighborhoods]. The building, very dissonant in form and materials from the urban landscape that had existed up until then in the area, today still stands as a reminder of some of the excesses from postmodern architecture.
That’s where Ricardo Passaporte has been working in the past 9 years, long before Beato was getting any attention at all. “I had no idea where Xabregas was, but I had two friends who were here renting 20 sqm spaces for 150 euros a month. Rent was really cheap and I was younger, so I took a room as a studio and moved in”, he says.
Then 4 years ago, he managed to rent a larger area in the shopping mall. Today he occupies 5 small rooms: one to do his paintings, another to photograph and show his artwork, one to store his art collection and a smaller one to take a break. The last one, he’s subletting to a friend.
In his opinion, what’s keeping Xabregas real is that “it doesn't look that pretty. Particularly this street, I think it actually looks bad and maybe that’s why there are still no hipster coffee shops and restaurants and why it’s still affordable, not just for me but for all the artists that are trying to make a living here. Otherwise, it would be impossible”.
Prices are not so cheap anymore, Passaporte admits. “Now they’re promoting this part of town as the cool bit, because the artists are here. But this is not London”.
As Ricardo invites us to visit his studio, we realize it’s under a very dusty renovation. “This part of town is really windy and my studio has some humidity. I need a more comfortable space to rest, when I work late. I’m also installing extractor fans since I use a lot of spray paint and aerosol. I need a decent extracting system. And when I get really dirty from painting, if I want to have a shower I always have to go home”, he tells us.
Getting inspiration: from AI to Cape Verdean Creole subculture
Different things inspire Passaporte as an artist: “I’m working on a few series at the same time, I tend to mix them all. Maybe I should be more organized and work different series in different periods of time, but that’s just how things happen around here.”
All his paintings have one thing in common, though: they are all born from images he collects, and not from his own drawings. Right now, he’s focused on the imagery that was used in school notebooks and books for kids, dating from the period of the dictatorship in Portugal [1933-1974], and during and around the Revolution [after 1974].
He also recently worked on a series based on Artificial Intelligence manipulations. “I briefed the algorithm and then cherry-picked what images I wanted to paint on”, he explains. But as this kind of work quickly became common, he decided to go back to his very rich archives of real images depicting the world as it is. “I listen to a lot Creole [from Cape Verde] rap music and I love the aesthetics that comes with it, in their videoclips. You can see plenty of that imagery in the region of Linha de Sintra. I also used to spend a lot of time on Google View, looking at remote places and just doing print screens of things that stroke me as peculiar”, he says.
Our favorite series from Passaporte, though, is not based on pictures, but on paintings from Dona Arminda, an old lady he met on the streets of Lisbon and who was, from time to time, homeless.
“I would hand her some reference images and ask her to draw her interpretations of them, paying her to do so. Then I would paint my own interpretations of her drawings. Unfortunately in the last year or so I lost track of her. I still own all of the pieces I ordered from her, even though the ones I painted based on her work are no longer in my possession”, he admits sadly.
Long time sold are also the paintings from his 2015 series, with logos from consumer brands like Lidl, Haribu, McDonalds or Tesco. Funny story: “I launched some socks with the Lidl logo, which was really a joke. But at the time my work was being shown in Cologne, at Ruttkowski 68, a gallery I still work with [Cologne, New York, Paris], and a Lidl top manager went there to see it. I think I also got mentioned at Amsterdam Fashion Week, because of those socks. Years later, Lidl launched their socks with zero credits to me. I didn’t want to be associated with that work anymore, but it would have been nice if they at least asked something.” Right?
Watching his name go by
Ricardo still goes out to paint graffiti, but these days it’s mostly just tagging. “I'm 36 now. Going out at night onto highways, carrying a backpack full of cans - I don’t have the patience anymore. I know a lot of people hate it, but mostly I just enjoy tagging. But that’s got nothing to do with my work. Since I don’t depend on it to make a living, it’s really just for pleasure and fun”, he admits.
Germes Gang collective, a subversive creative trio, was also a big part of his work for a while. As he recounts, “we published some books with Stolen Books, but we haven't done much lately. As we get older, we need to focus on other things, like being a father. For something relevant to happen, I would have to put a lot of time into it. Today I look at Germes Gang as something to have fun when I feel like it and when I have the time.”
If you want to see some of Ricardo’s work, you can check out the galleries he works with, like Duarte Sequeira, present in Lisbon and Seoul. Next June he’ll be showing at an art fair in South Korea and also doing a solo exhibition over there. If you go to the Artsy website, there’re also some pieces online.
For something completely different, you can see an exhibition curated by him, which opened on the 16th of March at ARBAG, in Lapa [a Lisbon neighborhood]. “It's a collection of drawings in format A4 and we’re showing around 50 artists in different stages of their careers, including some Germes Gang”.
