Paulo Nimer Pjota was 15 when he sold his first painting and already a three-year veteran. \u201cI don\u2019t really know what life is like without painting,\u201d the 37-year-old Brazilian artist tells me. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pjota\u2019s studio, which once served as his bedsit before he got married and had a son, is in a quiet neighbourhood of S\u00e3o 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\u2019 house, sit among this productive clutter.<\/p>\n
Paulo Nimer Pjota\u2019s Banquete com Teia, 2025. Photograph: Gui Gomes\/\u00a9 Paulo Nimer Pjota courtesy Maureen Paley London, and Mendes Wood DM, S\u00e3o Paulo<\/p>\n
We catch up over the phone as he travels to install his first UK institutional show at South London Gallery. Titled Encantados<\/a> <\/a>(Enchanted)<\/a>, it will feature 11 new paintings on canvas, hung against a vast and intricate wall drawing. The stretched works depict witchy and fantastical scenes, the surface imbued with a sense of shimmer in its layers of acrylic, oil and tempera.<\/p>\n In one painting, pink butterflies burst from a woman\u2019s stomach; in another, a monkey picks over a fallen urn. Gods, fish and huge blooming bouquets of flowers recur. Pjota, dressed in skateware and covered in tattoos, likens his process to a hip-hop producer, sampling imagery and motifs from sources that include ancient civilisations, Brazilian folklore, art history, exercise books and children\u2019s literature.<\/p>\n Paulo Nimer Pjota (third from left), with Maureen Paley, Oliver Evans and Julia Kater in Los Angeles. Photograph: Kyle Goldberg\/BFA.com\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n \u201cMythology has always been interesting to me,\u201d he says. \u201cStories I heard in my parents\u2019 house, in the media, these things form a big part of our life from a very young age. Becoming a father myself I started reading a lot of fables to my son and I was looking back on the drawings I used to make when I was a kid. Crazy animals, anthropomorphised nature.\u201d<\/p>\n In The Land Before Time for Jorge, two cacti appear, one crying, one laughing, like the masks of Greek tragedy, except their faces have the characteristics of ancient Japanese warriors. Pjota says the landscape in the background comes from a 15th-century painting about the colonial invasion of the Americas and a barely robed canoodling couple in the background is taken from a French tapestry. \u201cI made this painting for my son. The title references the film<\/a>, which everyone in Brazil watched as children.\u201d<\/p>\n The wall painting in London, which will feature a menagerie of creatures playing musical instruments, is a callback to his own youth amid the graffiti and hip-hop scene of S\u00e3o Jos\u00e9 do Rio Pr\u00eato, his hometown in the countryside of S\u00e3o Paulo state. Pjota started making art after attending the local hip-hop school, a kind of social club offering breakdance, DJing and graffiti classes in an otherwise conservative city devoid of much cultural diversion.<\/p>\n Pjota\u2019s A Cria\u00e7\u00e3o do Ouro, 2025. Photograph: Gui Gomes\/\u00a9 Paulo Nimer Pjota courtesy Maureen Paley London, and Mendes Wood DM, S\u00e3o Paulo<\/p>\n \u201cI started a crew with two friends, and then started another crew with the teachers of the school. I was this 13-year-old boy spraying with these 25-year-old guys. This is how I met all these star graffiti artists: Os G\u00eameos<\/a>, Ise<\/a>, Nunca<\/a>. It was super fun, super raw, the beginning of Brazilian graffiti.\u201d That first sale came from a community project at the local office of PT, the Workers\u2019 Party. \u201cHip-hop and street culture, it\u2019s about revolution and community.\u201d<\/p>\n He was attracted to using brushes as much as the spray can and developed his own style, painting both on the walls of the city and on canvas at home. \u201cI messed around with different graffiti styles: throw-ups<\/a>, wildstyle<\/a>, but soon I started to develop my own thing, very different from what else was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n Aged 17 he moved to S\u00e3o Paulo to attend art college, but his friends were still the older guys he had met on the streets. \u201cThe graffiti scene was harder here. There were more police, who were a lot more brutal and I wasn\u2019t a kid any more.\u201d His first exhibition at S\u00e3o Paulo gallery Mendes Wood DM, in 2012, featured far larger paintings than he is making now, his motifs such as crabs, crystals and anatomical drawings, equally diverse but rendered floating and discrete from each other on an otherwise monochrome surface \u2013 as they might coexist on a graffitied wall. Other works were made on sheets of scrap metal or old found textiles. He says there is a stronger sense of narrative to the latest work. \u201cThe symbols intersect in a more subtle way,\u201d he says. The juxtapositions are no long the purpose of the work. \u201cThey are a tool for constructing a new mythical and fantastical universe.\u201d<\/p>\n