Brazilian graffiti artist Lelin Alves travels throughout South America, covering urban walls with his large scale personality portraits. Alves paints his portraits in his unique caricature style; building facial expressions and shapes out of wild angles and bizarre perspectives. By exaggerating some areas of his subject’s faces and minimising others, Alves draws the viewers eyes to certain parts of the graffiti characters’ faces. This adds to the emotive expression of the character while also drawing the viewer into empathising with the figure.
Alves’ painted people express a plethora of human emotions, from antagonism and suspicion to the lighter emotions of humor, happiness and contentment. This street artist has successfully managed to do what so many artists before him have tried to do but failed; he’s expressed recognizable human traits in an abstract style without a loss of aesthetic appeal or character. One day, people will look back on Alves’s art style with the same level of admiration that we now attribute to the ground-breaking art of Pablo Picasso.
Besides working outdoors to create aerosol street art, Alves also swaps out his spray cans once in a while in favor of paintbrushes which he uses to create canvas-based fine art paintings. If you’re interested in buying one of his graffiti paintings, you can contact Lelin Alves through his website or on Facebook.
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- Lelin Alves paints two grossly exaggerated characters enjoying a cup of java. He’s squashed their facial features into the center of their grossly enlarged cheeks and jowls in a symbol of gluttony and self-satisfaction.
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- Lelin Alves overlays abstract patterns on top of caricaturized human hands to create an appealing combination of abstract and real world ideas.
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- A giant human hand holds an evil little dude while pointing in the direction of attack. This is a recurring theme in Lelin Alves’ street art. The concept is that the character is being controlled and guided by an unseen, powerful entity.
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- This is what a graffiti artist looks like through the eyes of a graffiti artist.
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- Lelin Alves puts his graffiti perspective skills to use in this comic and abstract mural of a classic bank robber stealing away with his loot.
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- Brazilian graffiti artist Lelin Alves leaves it up to you to decide whether this abstract comic character is acting in self-defensive or if he is taking an offensive martial arts stance.
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- Even though the character in this graffiti mural is so abstract and caricaturized, his sense of contentment is apparent.
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- Lelin Alves has found a way to express livid anger in a humorous way by combining cartoon art styles with his abstract graffiti style.
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- Two hands point these action-hungry birds in different directions. Lelin Alves often uses human hands holding characters in his graffiti murals. The disembodied hands hint at a powerful, unseen figure who directs the actions of the characters from behind the scenes.
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- At first, many of Lelin Alves’ street murals appear to be a collection of random abstract shapes, but on closer inspection, his crazily posed characters come into perspective.
