Artist Turns Trash Into Beauty

AUSTIN, Texas, Dec. 17, 2008 -- When Vijai Patchineelam was an undergraduate student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, some of the art he and his friends made looked like vandalism to others.

As fine arts students, they had to create art. His university offered them a warehouse-style studio, which was the size of three basketball courts, but it didn't offer paint, canvas or brushes.

"The situation was really bad. The studio building itself was falling apart, the ceiling was falling off, and sometimes we didn't even have water available," he said. "I was a student and didn't have money to buy the material I needed." So the group was forced to innovate and work with what it had.

"We just had this huge space and trash, like old chairs, old pianos and old easels." Patchineelam carried out most of the work he has completed so far in that studio, also known as "Pamplonao." He used the pianos. He used the chairs. He and his friends did paintings on the walls.

"Everything was trash already, so I don't think it was destruction of public property." Most of his professors did not agree with that.

"But we were trying something new. We were bending, not breaking, the rules," he said. "I don't understand how come we're in a painting school and people feel that painting is dirt and destroying property."

Just a year after graduating with a degree in industrial design, the 24-year-old Brazilian artist won the Ibere Camargo grant, which gave him the opportunity to spend two months in Austin on an artist-in-residency program with the University of Texas at Austin Blanton Museum of Art. Ibere Camargo is a Brazilian foundation that supports contemporary artistic production.

The foundation's jury, composed of national and international art experts, selected Vijai's application from a pool of 400 others.

Ursula Davila-Villa, Blanton Museum's curator of Latin American Art, was one of the jurors.

"I was amazed at how he developed different works in the process of finishing his undergraduate program. The images he conveyed were very powerful," she said.

Patchineelam uses photographs to document his work.

In his Frame Series from 2005, Patchineelam did paintings using a white concrete stage and a black wooden frame. He also used different objects, such as chairs and pieces of PVC pipe, instead of paint. The artist placed the frame on the white stage so that it looked like a framed canvas.