Stephan Doitschinoff aka Calma

Stephan Doitschinoff aka Calma (www.stephandoit.com.br) is a illustrator, painter, street-artist… from São Paulo (Brazil) that I had the chance to meet a couple of years ago when visiting that amazing city. Back then he was already a very active artist and had started to manage making a living with his art already but since then he’s been particularly busy traveling to the US and Europe for shows and projects and his very peculiar and distinctive imagery full of religious connotations and sentences in Latin have become known to a much bigger audience around the globe. Recently he has also done a series of painting for Sepultura’s last album and one full page of Juxtapoz magazine has featured one of his painting that was exhibited in BLK/MRKT gallery in California for a anniversary group show. We are looking forward to his show at Subaquatica early in 2007 and in the meantime we wanted to talk to him about his work, current and upcoming projects and wherabouts.

When, where, how and why you started to do work on the streets?

I started back in Sao Paulo when I was 14/15, doing stencils with punk rock designs like the Black Flag bars and later on with my own drawings… at that time it was just about skateboarding, playing with my band and having fun, get a spraycan, go bomb some stencils and write some random words.

São Paulo is a city where there is a long tradition, first with Pixação, later with Hip Hop Graffiti and worldwide famous writers like Os Gemeos and in the recent years there have been also many artists doing art on the streets with other techniques, what we could call Street Art, like yourself, also getting global recognition. I have a couple of questions about SP:

How accurate do you think the image people from other parts of the world have about the whole SP situation (art-in-the-streets-wise)?

“Ars Mori” 2004. Mixed media on wall. Porto alegre, Brazil.

I’m not sure but I guess it’s kinda difficult to really get the right picture before you go there… how can one explain the vibe an art scene has? You got to go and check it out…

How do you feel SP has affected your work being such a gigantic, crazy (and also amazing) city and how do you expect to affect the city and its people?

I think I have been influenced a lot by Sao Paulo! It’s where I grew up and where my roots are.
From Pixo letters to Candomble and Umbanda culture, from the Sacred Arts Museum (one of my favorite spots in SP) to the local punk/hardcore scene, and of course from my friends. Also, I don’t know if I expect to affect either the city or the people, but I am very glad every time I get any positive response.

“Help Me!!!”. 2006. Mixed media on Electrolux Refrigerator. Instalation at Contact Theater, Manchester, UK.

Now you seem to be participating in many shows all over and also getting commissioned work but going back a little how did you first felt as an artist, as someone that would be making a living with your art?

In 2000, when, after quitting my job I first decided to make a living from illustration, of course I was a bit afraid of failing and had to work in an office again… at that time I had to do some random jobs, I’ve worked with lots of different things including a car-wash and a supermarket. But it feels different knowing it’s a side job while you are trying to show your portfolio to people and get some illustration job or something…

In your work there’s a clear influence of religious iconography. Where does it come from?

I grew up in a very strict religious environment, being my father a protestant priest I grew up hanging out in the local church and I was supposed to be always there, go to the church’s summer camp and stuff, it was very heavy and full of rules and pressure. Soon I would not accept all that control and I rebelled against all those ideas, by the age of 14 I started hanging out with the skate kids in my neighborhood and got into punk, skateboarding and also into underground comics, that was when I first saw the work of Brazilian underground cartoonist Francisco Marcatti and for the first time in got interested in drawing comics as a possible career.

Sometimes your work seems to show a dark side of all that religious images. Are you being critical, do you feel a religious or spiritual person?

“All Is Vanity”. 2005. 60 x 60 cm. Mixed media on canvas.

Religious art is what really inspires me. From Ars-moriendi to Tibetan Buddhism to Voodoo imagery, all symbolic/spiritual and mythological art has always been my main passion and my main influence. And it’s what I am trying to do as well. Yes I consider myself a spiritual person and yes, some of the imagery you see in my work criticizes the commercialization of religion and how the spiritual power owned by the churches is being used to control the masses and support corrupted governments.

In one of your paintings “The Annunciation”, there are 2 characters, I guess that one would be a virgin and the other an angel or archangel but they are engaged in such a strange behavior such as the angel character biting the virgin’s hand or surrounded by disturbing elements like the sword going through the virgin’s head, a diamond or the name Abraxas, a evil-good deity. All these seem to be indicative precisely of that same concept as in Abraxas, of a dual nature in everything, not only human but also divine where every good must have an evil counterpart but also might be just critical with the hypocritical attitudes of churches or of the human side of divine beings. Could you elaborate on this?

“The Annunciation”. 2005. 60 x 60 cm. Mixed media on canvas.

Sure, starting with the message brought by Abraxas angel: “Lasciate ogni mediocritá” which is Latin for “Leave your mediocrity behind”. (Note: It was believed that Abraxas was the name of a god who incorporated both good and evil, the myths of a non-dual god. Abraxas has, like many other “pagan menaces” such as the “Goddess” and “Baphomet”, been declared by the church as another face of Satan and has vanished away from popular culture…) In The Divine Comedy, the angel appears every time one has paid his sins and is ready to upgrade a level in purgatory, as a metaphor for leaving mediocre ways of thinking behind. The difficulty in this detachment is shown by the virgin holding tight the bird of guilt, shame and frustration. The angel’s presence and message project her shadow (shadow as in the psychological term) and reveal the diamond (representing the path to the soul) that is the object of the Annunciation. Meaning that the way to achieve enlightenment would be finding, accepting, and incorporating the shadow, to find the egg of light.

In another of your paintings titled “Spiritual Grill / All You Can Eat Meat Hosts” you seem to portray an image of Christ also full of contradictions or opposites such as the tragical and the comical, the spiritual and the commercial, the mystical and the corporeal… All these concepts, that creates a shocking experience on the observer because of the mixture of diverse and opposite ideas seems to be a common theme in your work. Maybe if you can explain this particular image a little bit it would be a helpful “guide” to your paintings in general.

“Spiritual Grill / All You Can Eat Meat Hosts”

This painting is about the misappropriation and commercialization of ancient sacred rituals, in this case the ritual of eating the god’s flesh. Borrowed from older religions, Christian mythology has taken the act of eating the sacred being as a way to incorporate the spirit of god into the human body through the ritual. So the painting is about Jesus being a bull ready to be cut down for a BBQ and on the letters that surround the beast you read “ex gutta melis, generatur flumina fellis” (like a drop of honey that generated a river of bile). So, from the original drop of honey (Christ and the Christian idea of unconditional love, respect and altruism) comes the river of bile (the church and hundreds of years of genocide, lies, the holy inquisition etc)…

You have worked doing illustration for different music bands, recently for Sepultura. How do you approach your work in these occasions? How does the music for which you are doing work affects it?

I would ask the band what is the whole concept for the album if there is one. For Sepultura’s record, the album was inspired by Dante’s “Divina Comedia”, so I studied the 3 books and researched Dante’s life and times. In other cases, like when I worked with band Saves the Day, Chris (the vocal and main songwriter) just wrote me this very long email telling me how he felt and what he was writing about…

“Drug Paradise”. 2005. 60 x 60 cm. Mixed media on canvas.

You seem to get a lot of commissioned work for record labels, shops, etc… And at the same time you do paintings and other work for art shows. When you compare the ones with the other I get the feeling that these are not so different because you probably get a lot of freedom from the clients and companies when you get commissioned work. Is this so? Do you realize many other artists are very conditioned when they do commissioned work? What do you think is the key for getting that freedom?

I don’t know what the key is but choosing carefully your clients and where you want to be is a good start. I consider myself lucky to work with people that give me freedom to create, but it is like this mainly in the music industry. You know, musicians get creative composing and performing music, so they admire what you do and let it go. But when you are working with a brand, and that means it’s through an ad company, then you are working with guys that do work creating visuals… and they mainly already know what they want when they approach us.

You’ve been traveling quite a lot during the last couple of years, after we met. You have been to California for a collective show at the BLK MRKT gallery and also to NY, LA, Pittsburgh and lately you’ve had a show in Manchester. Do you feel all this is making your work mutate or evolve quicker or differently as if you had stayed in SP all this time?

Yes, I’m sure it influences me a lot, but I’m not sure how it does, yet. What I can say is that it’s been a big honor to exhibit my work along with artists that I have been a fan of for years such as Espo, Kinsey and Tiffany Bozic.

Although Internet seems to be playing a big role making all information spread out faster and therefore one might think that differences tend to decrease I would like to hear your view on the difference between the US and the European Underground-Street-Art-Nu-Pop-Alternative art scenes because of how you’d had the chance to work here and there and also where do you think Brazil and Latin America fits into all this.

“Mental Health” Mixed media on door, 2006, Manchester, UK.

The American and European “art machine” seems to work pretty well even in the urban/lowbrow art scene, playing big roles in galleries, even in museums, media etc, but once you go to South America its still very underground and small, of course there are people there making it happen but not as much as around here…

How did all this work and shows come about? Maybe it was precisely Internet and being featured in a website such as woostercollective.com helped. How do you feel Internet has changed the way artists relate to other artists, the public in general, galleries, etc…?

Yes I can say it helped me a lot, especially to break the distance… You know, living in Brazil everything seems so far away… there is this very heavy economic barrier on the way, i.e. a ticket bought in Brazil to Europe or to the US is much much more expensive than the other way around, also all the trouble to get a visa, etc…

So through my own website and sites that supported me like Wooster, Shift Japan, BrasilInspired and Ekosystem I got the opportunity to contact artists and galleries and exhibit in other countries.

“Ani Aeurora, Goddess of Sex and Milk”. 2005.

Any new projects coming up that you might what to share with us?

Well, right now I’m working on a set of canvasses for All Star Hustlaz show in White Walls Gallery (SF), and also for solo shows coming up in Berlin and Melbourne.

Something you want to do that it hasn’t been proponed to you yet?

I want to paint a big ship and let it sail the ocean.

April 30th, 2006 08:35pm Administrador