It's been two decades since Alexandre Orion first took up graffiti in São Paolo. Today, he is one of a small handful of street artists embracing a non-damaging sustainable art form most commonly known as “reverse graffiti.” Orion considers himself less of an artist and more of an activist, using his project, Ossario, to stimulate the dialogue on the effects of pollution on the human population. His compositions are not done with paint, but rather by wiping away soot to create relief images; as well as by reusing collected soot to paint on other surfaces. His main tools are rags and water.
Since Ossario broke ground, Orion has used the walls of a busy metropolitan tunnel in his hometown with a series of striking, ghostly skulls that peer out into the darkness at passing drivers. Since then he has expanded his intervention pieces to some other the world's most populous cities, including Mexico City and Rio de Janiero, where a spine painted from soot stands 28 meters high on an industrial exhaust pipe.
What is your process and what are your tools?
My process is completely free and my tools are whatever enables me to conceive an idea. Ideas have to come before style or technique. I have done a series using reverse graffiti as technique, but my work is always a combination of processes. What I am interested in is not the aesthetics of my works, but how they might set off processes in people's minds.
What methods do you use to create your images?
Just rags and my fingers. My skulls are hand drawn, one by one. The first intervention I got recorded on video was 300 meters long with over 3,500 skulls by the time the city came along to wipe it off.
"Making an intervention that has a social impact is hard, because it depends solely on artistic creation, on the idea and the force a work exerts over the place where it is produced."
How do you collect soot to be reused for paint?
I washed out rags used during the selective cleaning interventions, then waited for decanting and evaporating until only the soot was left, which I made into paint that looks like watercolor, but much more rustic.
