Pichação is described in today’s New York Times as an “alphabet designed for urban invasion.”
It nearly envelops some of São Paulo’s government buildings, residential high-rises, even public monuments, with lettering eerily reminiscent of Scandinavia’s ancient runic writing.
The most daring practitioners risk their lives, scaling building facades at night to paint their script at the crests of smog-darkened skyscrapers. Some have fallen to their death from terrifying heights.
Their graffiti, called pichação, from the Portuguese verb “pichar,” or cover with tar, reflects the urban decay and deep class divisions that still define much of São Paulo, a city with a metropolitan population approaching 20 million. It is just one reminder of the social ills that Brazil’s economic boom has so far failed to resolve, and may perhaps even be accentuating, despite recent strides in reducing income inequality.
According to François Chastenet,
Only few original alternative models exist independently to the now global New York experience/aesthetic—the São Paulo pixação scene and Cholo writing in Los Angeles are two pretty rare examples and constitute geographical aesthetical particularities. We can observe the emergence of a genuine “urban efficiency” in (illegal) architectural lettering, the illegal and hand-crafted context bringing new formal solutions. The fact that these letterings are illegal is essential; pixações from São Paulo can be seen as an alphabet designed for urban invasion, a beautiful “total coverage” writing system. So both the pixações and Cholo letters can be seen as an expression of the consequences of the 21st-century megalopolis conditions on the drawing of letterforms, as an unexpected evolution of the Latin alphabet. São Paulo and Los Angeles Cholo writers were able to create their own original identity through letter-forms, this fact being pretty unique in the visual communication of subcultures. As an architect interested in urban planning, and a graphic designer and typographer by academic training, it was hard not to be interested be this.
And here’s my translation of the distinction between graffiti and pichação made on the Wikepedia site in Portuguese:
In Brazil, there’s a difference between graffiti and pichação. Both tend to feed discussions concerning the limits of art, over free art or commodity-art, freedom of expression, over Pollock, Rothko, and Basquiat.
Graffiti, in principle, is much more elaborate and of more aesthetic interest, being socially accepted as a form of expression of contemporary art, respected and even supported by the public sector. Pichação is considered essentially transgressive, predatory, visually aggressive, contributing to the degradation of the scenery, a form of vandalism without any artistic or communicative value. What is generally included in this category are repetitive inscriptions, which are very simplified and quickly executed, basically symbols or characters similar to hieroglyphics, of one color, which cover the walls of cities. Pichação is, by definition, made in prohibited places and at night, in rapid operations, treated as an attack on the public or private patrimony. Therefore, its authors are subject to prison sentences and fines. Today, graffiti is either done in permitted locales or in locales especially designed for it.
In general, the coexistence between graffiti artists and pichadores is peaceful. Many graffiti artists were pichadores in the past, and pichadores don’t work on walls that have graffiti.
