A Flâneur in Her Own Town – Camila Belchior

Juliana Russo, Amontoado. Vector illustration u.d. Courtesy of artist.

A city like São Paulo is not particularly conducive to meandering. In the sea of almost 20 million people a vast majority drive from A to B. During their long and gridlocked transit, glances out of the window allow for degrees of recognition of an outer layer of what they see but perhaps never truly a full knowledge of what lies beyond it, the character, locations, the make-up and its idiosyncrasies are part of its appeal. São Paulo-based Juliana Russo, makes notes on the city in image form. Her sketches and vector pieces are slices of the underbelly of Paulistano society and the architectural mesh that accommodates some and neglects others.

A series of vector drawings done over the last couple of years, focus on dilapidated buildings occupied by squatters, known as cortiços and favelas, that bring forth the plethora of visual references accessible to anyone who gives it time. Exposed electrical wires, unfinished housing, graffiti, VWs, stray dogs, stray people, stray objects, early 20^th Century architectural triumphs, early 21^st Century architectural disasters and a mish mash selection of convulsing buildings with colonial-style balconies is the setting at hand. However much disarray is visible on the surface of these images, their impact comes through on a secondary level, an emotional one, which slowly draws its audience into the lyricism that lies within them and that draws on our past personal engagement with similar scenes.

The series "Urban Saints" is sensitive, devoted to and in reverence of the city. Its context and archetypes are based on Catholic models of popular devotion that are used here to canonize icons of the Paulistano population. The characters are based on those ignored, rendered superfluous or marginal in society, but include your typical lower-middle class citizen. The "Urban Saints" are small illustrated flyers that, as a group, form a cross-section of characters that in essence could be universal but are charged with distinctly Paulistano traits or at least draw on those images.

Lemanjá brings Catholicism and the Brazilian cult of Candomblé hand in hand. Its title is the name of the Orixá [deity] of the mother of the seas and its format, as with all in the series, paper tokens of devotion traditionally used by Catholics. Lemanjá is floating on murky water. Her crown gives her dignity, the flowers floating round which are possibly from admirers could be conceived as paper rubbish clumps. Her pots and pans are her pride and as she calmly sits on her couch-throne in a barren setting, the realisation seeps in that she is like so many we have seen before and although perhaps distant to our reality, so close in the physical urban network.

Nossa Senhora da Graça delicately portrays an elderly lady; Our Lady of Urbanism, perhaps. Santo do Ouro is a walking advertisement for mid-range jewellers, which line the back streets of downtown São Paulo, in the shadows of the grand Municipal Theatre and the Benedictine Monastery. Santa Homeless, in its simplicity, portrays an inert saint, unmotivated and unwanted yet available and engaging if only one stopped to notice her.

Ju Russo is a flâneur in a convulsing city and her sensitive renderings of figures and locations zoom into what is commonly unmerited, subliminally accepted, taken for granted or blurred into a generalised image. Through her images there is a new-found intimacy and dialogue with the city through glimpses and moments belonging to a third party that unveil freshly what we may have already seen and not acknowledged.