PART 1
Amidst an overpopulation of tags and naïve faded drawings left by graffiti from the eighties to the end of the nineties, the new century saw the beginning of a new wave of Latin American Street Art, which significantly rescued elements of the visual arts in public spaces.
The fresh imagery full of syncretistic signs of these new times is probably one of the expressions that has had the greatest impact on the eyes of multiple generations, giving way to a neo-muralist movement that, although taking up part of the legacy of its well-known predecessors, has its own aesthetic and imaginary codes.
Above all, the spontaneous attitude of appropriation of urban and rural environments that this movement displays, with authentic complicity before the culture of the people, their trades, their history, their race, their ancestors and religious beliefs, is a cause for reflection. We could say that the new exponents of muralism no longer propose grandiloquent social or political ideologies, but rescue the wounded souls of silenced people and offer them monumental spaces to stand before the gaze of a community in the midst of its inertia.
Another of their approaches is to revisit an urban identity lost perhaps due to the American television and film invasion of the late eighties, which caused this sort of cognitive dissonance among the people of Latin America, about "how our cities should look", versus how our central and marginal environments really looked, always tinged with precariousness and indelible traces of our mestizo culture.
It is deeply interesting to watch the evolution of some of our talented exponents, first as graffiti artists acting clandestinely, who gradually transformed their natural dexterity until they reached new levels in their artistic resources, engaging in monumental productions, where the original sense of their interventions on the wall remains intact, rising with greater power.
In new latin american muralism, we can sense an evident pride for our way of relating to "the whole", for the rich and profound wisdom of the ancestors, for the undercurrent of mysticism that these new generations make their own without qualms.
"Muralism is an art that gives new meanings to places and things that are forgotten and very banal, but on the wall they take on an aura of importance."
Francisco Maturana
