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\u00a0caricature 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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0aesthetic 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.<\/p>\n
Besides working outdoors to create aerosol street art, Alves also\u00a0swaps out\u00a0his 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<\/a> or on Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n