Projected to be a publishing house, Choque- as is called, ended up as a commercial QG of brazilian young artists coming from graffiti, tattoo, graphic design, illustration and anything that speaks urban languages in Brazil.

In fact, Choque’s artists- composed of and eclectic mix of graduated designers and school drop outs, reflects today’s urban youth view on subjects involving social awareness, religion, vintage references, consumerism and today’s mutant urban feelings expressed in varied forms that goes from sculptures, abstract expressionisms to portraits of city sceneries, its people and its inner desires.

Flávia Mendonça:

Tell us a bit about your background, what you used to do before opening Choque Cultural?

Baixo Ribeiro:

I was born in Sao Paulo and I started studying architecture in 1981, but I didn’t finished the grad course. At that time I was already working with fashion and in the beginning of the eighties in Brazil there were no specialized schools in this area. Then, the following 20 years I worked in the fashion business, and I still do a little, working as a consultant in the youth segment.        

What did you do in fashion?

I did something that later I came to know is called branding. I had teams and developed products, created marketing campaigns, and used to do the whole branding of streetwear brands, also labels related with skating, plus youth lines from major corporate companies. In fact I started working with art because of fashion. I always brought many artists from graffiti to collaborate with my work developing t-shirt prints, caps and such.

So, when did you start with the idea of creating a street art gallery?

My wife’s family always been involved with art. My wife, Mariana, is the daughter of Aldemir Martins*. In 2000, we started to create what is Choque Cultural with the network of street artists I’d made when working with fashion. In fact, Choque Cultural was born as publishing house. But before we opened the gallery to the public, during 2 years we did sort of a workshop where we experimented many presentation forms. I believe today’s contemporary art, specially the kind of art focused on youth, needs a different presentation. Youth today is not attracted by the clean or very “spectacularized” presentations seen in galleries or museums exhibitions, or these monumental exhibitions. They want to see the works closer.With that in mind we studied and got into some thesis, in fact Choque Cultural is a thesis about a new way to present art.  Is an art that needs to be more relaxed, with less production, with a higher involvement between the audience and the work exposed. Is more of an emotional impact than mental. * great brazilian artist whose concept was based in the popularization of art, he used from boxes, to cans, bottle labels as a medium for his work.Tell us about your audience. How was it in the beginning and how it changed today?

Our audience today is bigger, however the composition of our audience is almost the same as in the beginning. Since our launch, besides the artists, journalists, curators and collectors that were already part of our network, we’ve had a group of very young kids coming to the gallery. They are its soul, a very strong part of it. We gained a wider audience in 2006, when we exchanged artists with Fortes Villaça, an important contemporary art gallery. It called the attention of the media and public to the new artists we were proposing and to the new market we were discovering. Our artists had their work shown there and, we had important names from brazilian contemporary art such as Ernesto Neto, Adriana Varejão, Beatriz Milhazes, Vick Muniz, among others, doing special projects in our space. It was an historical moment because we managed to do an interesting chock of brazilian art generations and, certainly,  this enhanced the numbers of traditional collectors that were kind of looking at us from far but didn’t really came to see what was going on in here.

So that’s when you went from underground to mainstream?

Our intention never was to stay hidden in the underground. We come from the underground because everything that is new comes from the underground, things are not born in the mainstream, however we never hid our will to dialog with the mainstream. We are not here to play, we know the value of the artists we are exhibiting in Choque Cultural.       

What about this young audience. Are they junior collectors?

It’s interesting to see really young boys coming to the gallery and telling me that they’ve bought a poster here for R$ 60,00 and now is worth two, three times more. They are becoming small collectors, thinking on their collections as an investment. Of course they also do it because they identify with the works and want to have it just as they collect caps or certain sneakers. -        

What about the international audience?  

We had it since the beginning with the publishing house, but after 2007 with a big exhibition in NY that we started to solidify our audience abroad. The international market is very big and we are just starting. Europe in general is very receptive to our kind of art. -        

Choque’s artists in its majority don’t have an art school background and are just now learning to put their street art inside galleries worldwide. How do you work with them, specially to embrace the international audience?

I think that the aesthetic part of art doesn’t need to be learned at an art school. But we need to work the professional side such as how to relate with the market, with the galleries, with all the image commercialization. We are studying and learning all the time about how to manage and administrate these artist’s work. And I’m not talking about the work exposed in the wall but the artist’s trajectory, the way he deals with this career, his works ethics, politics, aesthetics, also the relationship he has with his partners, audience, collectors and other with artists. This is different for each artist and each one deserves personalized projects, in fact that’s what we’ve doing with Choque’s artists. -        

Are you branding Choque’s artists?

No. Its important to have in mind that an artist is not a brand. This became clear to me after talking with Tim Biskup, an american artist that is presenting at ‘Made in America’ exhibit in Choque. He is involved with many projects related to fashion, toy industry,  illustrations, and his style is very personal, almost a brand. The thing is, he could’ve stayed relaxed doing his things and applying his graphic style to a large menu of products, but as an artist he needs transcend his style, rethink it, and question the idea that the artist is a brand. Today he is changing his style and experimenting much more than before and I think this is the answer. The artist is not a brand because it needs to take more chances. In principle a brand doesn’t need to do that, it needs a strong image, a good relation with its consumers and it will propose things to its audience all the time to make them feel satisfied. The artist doesn’t do this, it needs to experiment, transcend its ideas, and propose questions to the audience all the time, it needs to have the experience and to take risks. -        

You’ve once mentioned that Brazil is living a very special moment because of the quality of artists that have been appearing and you even compared this fact with the Tropicalia movement from the seventies. Do you think they are living a new movement pushed by street art?

Yes, I think we are in this moment, specially in Sao Paulo. I believe this was pushed by some interesting factors such as the strong skate scene here plus, the very active hip hop and rock communities in the last two decades, and the graffiti and tatoo schools that congregate artists that are learning together, using the tattoo studio or the streets as labs and making individual works always based on the discussions made by the group around it, that exchange of experiences transformed itself in a sort of school. It generated a rich fruit of artistic possibilities, projects and thesis. All very intuitive and experimental. Also, there is the constant involvement of the audience in this discussion, something that the conceptual art left behind. These street artists have an immense feedback from anyone they want. They can go and paint in front of the museum and have a feed back from its curator and can go paint inside the favelas and have the poor community’s response. This posture towards the audience is new. -        

What is the differential seen in Brazilian artists?

Energy.