Doing fine for Insight

An art feature on the growth of fine illustration in street art, printed in Insight under the title: Doing Fine: OContemporary favours finesse this month

If Olivia Connelly, gallery director at OContemporary is right, then what could loosely be described as urban art is the most globally significant movement since Pop. And, seeing as her new exhibition of delicate illustration and fine graphic art from three artists, a Brazilian, a Frenchman and a Brit, is set to sell out, we believe her. It’s this truly international aspect that gives art outside the academy its form – but this is often left off the walls: “Much of the fluff from the UK at the moment is loud, brash and big. Like any fluff, it will be forgotten. I’m concerned about curating works that will stand the test of time, and this is a quality all three artists this month have.”
It’s this timelessness and universality that marks the work on show out from the madding crowd. Banksy and his band of his imitators’ glory comes from their ability to point to one moment in time – when gay policemen became a badge of civic pride, when we started to feel uneasy about that CCTV camera on the corner, and so on. On the other hand though, Thais Beltrame’s work is quintessentially Brazilian, it can be enjoyed in any time or place. A trained illustrator who runs with the São Paulo art família Em Foco, she depicts child-like figures with intimate simplicity, and in one series of miniature pencil etchings she maps the childhoods of her friends, those day-to-day experiences that mark growing-up – from being scared of a dog leashed outside a shop, or loss felt when an ice cream scoop falls on the pavement. “I asked all my friends for things they remembered feeling when they were young,” she told us when she visited. “The interesting thing is that whenever anyone sees the pictures they instantly tell me that they have the same memories, that they remember the same things.”
A high level of technical skill unites the artists, though none of the three were formally educated in Fine Art – Thais studied illustration in Chicago, and San and John are trained graphic designers. John’s monotypes follows the master Goya as much as the urban artist Futura: “I worked on commission for years [for workwear brands like Carhartt] and it’s nice to have complete freedom, and to not be tied to a brief. I like ancient mythology, and when you look at people like Goya, you realise how little changes.”