Rimon Guimarães

Rimon Guimarães (b. 1988) belongs to a generation that grew out of Brazilian street art — a school with a lineage of its own. São Paulo pixação, the monumental graphics of Os Gêmeos, the naivety of Kobra: the Brazilian street has given the world stage more independent languages than any other country outside the United States.

Guimarães started out in Curitiba with fly-posting and street interventions; by today he has painted murals in more than twenty-seven countries, from The Gambia to Malaysia. He is self-taught, and in his case that is not a biographical detail but a method: instead of academic training he chose the traveller's eye and a direct absorption of the Afro-Brazilian visual tradition, from the ritual mask to the carnival costume.

If you look for his place on the map, it lies between two poles. On one side, the modernist line running from Tarsila do Amaral and her Antropofagia, with its idea that Brazilian culture does not borrow what is foreign but swallows and digests it. On the other, today's global wave of diaspora artists who have brought figurative painting about Black identity back into the focus of the market and museum programmes.

Guimarães works at that junction, but with the tools of the street: large forms, a hard outline, flat colour, a composition made to be read from a distance and at speed.