Claudio Ethos

Claudio Ethos / Claudio Rafael

Urban Art

October 7, 2014

Claudio Ethos is a Brazilian mural artist also known for his amazing skills with the ballpoint pen. His work is often twisted manipulation of images and landscapes with abstract tendencies that explore the more spiritual side of the artistic process.

Ethos was born by the name Claudio Rafael in 1982 in Sao Paulo, Brazil - and he was one of the 14 brothers. Although he studied for 2 years at a college for visual arts, Claudio never finished the course because he found it so boring that he left a formal education to simply work on art he deemed exciting.

Ethos has been interested in graffiti since the 90's. He was surrounded by Pichacao (the Sao Paolo tag hand style) and began spray painting around the age of 15, at the end of the 90's in a small town in Sao Paolo, called Birigui. His style is so unique that one can easily distinguish it at a glance. His murals were the reason why many of the traditional contemporary artists took a second look at street art.  By using a minimal color palette – he creates these large scale surreal murals that have not only conquered his country, which is filled with many known street artistic figures, but Claudio has also captured the eyes of many around the world.

As he likes to say, his characters try to depict emotional and spiritual states because there are no accurate definitions for so many of these sensations – they just appear and he just tries to translate these things that are captured only by intuition.

His technique first involves working in sketch books and on canvases with a ballpoint pen, just to translate those meticulous drawings onto the concrete for all to see. By mapping narratives, Ethos depicts characters found all over the city; they are often anxious, struggling through a cramped, concrete megalopolis, but persevering nevertheless. It is obvious that his inspiration is rooted in the streets and generated from experience, dreams, and memory.

Ethos was highly influenced by the well-known writers on the Brazilian scene: Os Gemeos, Vitche, Onesto, Herbert Baglione… But, his style has taken its own highly unique state and individual genesis.

He prefers to work with dimensions closer to three meters and feels that producing art for galleries is an entirely different type of communication, and feels as if he is very young to the gallery scene. Ethos has had five solo exhibitions to date, yet still feels as if he is somewhat restricted by the space of a gallery and he is very shy about the fact that he has exhibited in Italy, France, Netherlands, Austria, The States and Paraguay.

Claudio Ethos currently lives between Sao Paolo and LA.

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