‘Street culture is about revolution’: Brazilian ‘hip-hop’ painter Paulo Nimer Pjota

The artist started with graffiti at 13 in São Paulo. Now, he samples motifs from mythology and his vast, fantastical paintings have taken over the walls of the South London Gallery Paulo Nimer Pjota was 15 when he sold his first painting and already a three-year veteran. “I don’t really know what life is like without painting,” the 37-year-old Brazilian artist tells me. “It is in everything I do, the movies that I watch, the books that I read. They might not have anything to do with art, but I can find something in them that I might be able to use.” Pjota’s studio, which once served as his bedsit before he got married and had a son, is in a quiet neighbourhood of São Paulo: there are shelves lined with gourds, skulls, postcards and other trinkets, a pair of skateboards hang on the wall and a desk overflows with tubes of paint. A pile of sketches he made when he was a teenager, discovered at his parents’ house, sit among this productive clutter. We catch up over the phone as he travels to install his first UK institutional show at South London Gallery. Titled Encantados (Enchanted), it will feature 11 new paintings on canvas, hung against a vast and intricate wall dr