Paulo Nimer Pjota has been a presence in the Brazilian art scene for over a decade. His paintings on unframed canvases and sheet metal have become instantly recognizable with their disparate motifs – among them archaeological artefacts, masks, cartoons, pots, plants, and pumpkins – rendered in flat acrylic or oils against a rough monochrome tempera background. Geométrico com vaso (Geometry with vase, 2022), for example, shown recently at Delirium, an artist-run space in São Paulo, depicts a gothic serving dish painted in black acrylic on the upper half of a bisected canvas. The lower half of the canvas is covered with a sheet of orange enameled, dented scrap metal on which the artist painted three squares, each containing Op art-style black and white parallel lines that swirl into vanishing points. A Pjota painting might also be accompanied by an object or series of objects – pots, bronze-cast gourds, bronze-cast plants – as if some of his painted realm has escaped into our own.

‘I think of my process as being like a hip-hop producer,’ he says when I visit his studio, a cavernous warehouse in Ipiranga, a working-class neighborhood in the south of São Paulo. ‘In hip-hop, they use a lot of samples. I use a lot of samples in my work as well. I remix images out of context – images from the old world are layered with the contemporary world.’

Pjota grew up in São José do Rio Preto, a quiet town in the state of São Paulo, where ‘there was no art, just what is called an “arte popular” museum, dedicated to José Antônio da Silva, and a hip-hop house,’ he says. Pjota gravitated to the latter, a kind of cultural center common in Brazil that offers classes in graffiti, music, DJing, and breakdancing. ‘I bought CDs by rap-rock bands like Planet Hemp and that led me to graffiti. Hip-hop and graffiti were the only cultural things available to me, and I loved them. They allowed me to think about the world in a political way. They gave me a crew too, because I was a kid who didn’t play soccer, who didn’t like country music.’

Pjota broke from his peers, however, when he started to use a brush instead of an aerosol can to apply paint on the walls. ‘There were a lot of rules within the graffiti scene at the time, about style and the kind of materials it was cool to use. I still love graffiti, but I wanted to do more, and I thought drawing and painting offered me more possibilities.’ At age 17, Pjota moved to São Paulo, enrolling at the Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo to study art. By that time, he had already participated in a handful of group exhibitions, and in 2012 he had his first solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo.

Now 36, his tattoos and muscular frame give a hint to that youth of graffiti, skateboarding, and hip-hop concerts, and his love of street culture has continued in collaborations with various skate and fashion brands. Next month, he will debut his latest set of limited-edition products at Art Basel Miami Beach. ‘As it’s Miami, I thought I’d make stuff you might want to take to the beach,’ he says. There will be three tie-dye T-shirts, each featuring a different painting by Pjota printed against a swirling psychedelic background, a bag, a cap, and a notebook, plus some posters.

‘After my partner and I had a baby 3 months ago, I became very nostalgic,’ he says. ‘I started listening to music from when I was a teenager and watching cartoons again, so it seemed obvious that the T-shirts should be tie-dye. It’s a shame that has disappeared as a style.’

Fatherhood has ushered in a reflective mood more generally in his practice, too. His latest paintings reference drawings he used to make as a teen, and they are more surreal than previous work. Before visiting Pjota’s studio I saw the ‘Panorama’ exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, an annual survey of Brazilian art. The artist’s ‘Carta Marinha’ (Sea Chart, 2024) series dominates one section of the show: Five vibrantly orange, individually titled, canvases are hung tight alongside each other against a vast black-and-white wall drawing of a fantastical rainforest scene; on the canvases, fauns, salamanders, and sharks dance around blue flowers bunched in a chintzy pot.

The pot, he tells me, is based on a memory of one that was in his grandmother’s house, and for a recent exhibition at Mendes Wood DM in New York, Pjota mined further childhood recollections. The result was a series of works in which domestic scenes are rendered in a marvelously weird fashion. In Cenas de casa com flor estrelada (House scene with starry flowers, 2023), a vase with flowers sits on a side table while more flowers burst across a monochromatic peach background like supernovas. In Noite com Julia (Night with Julia, 2023), half a dozen further vases are pictured against the night sky, while a giant, supernatural genie-like female figure dominates the right side of the canvas. Similar paintings will feature in three forthcoming shows at Mendes Wood DM in Paris, François Ghebaly in Los Angeles, and a third at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam.

For these works, ‘I dug out all the drawings I made as a teenager in São José do Rio Preto,’ Pjota says rifling through a box on his studio desk. ‘I had them kept in drawers but hadn’t really looked at them. I wanted to look back at the old Paulo, the Paulo before I moved to São Paulo.’

The pencil and pen drawings of his youth were influenced by Greek mythology and pre-Columbian Brazilian art. They could easily be the basis of a tattoo or a skateboard design, but here, half-finished works, hanging on the studio walls as we speak, feature their motifs rendered in paint on canvas. ‘I’m mixing those drawings with domestic scenes, scenes I remember from my childhood home.’

While the type of motifs he uses in his work is changing, Pjota says he still owes a debt to the urban realm: ‘In my hometown, we would spend hours and hours walking the city looking for walls to use. We would walk everywhere, and I continued to do so even when I moved to São Paulo. This is how I started to think about images that don’t seem to belong together. In the city you have all these different pictures coming together and overlapping: posters, adverts, graffiti.’

This decontextualization and recontextualization of the image lies at the heart of Pjota’s work, old and new; it is what provides the latest work its unsettled, disconcerting quality, the canvas becoming a space in which plants and gods, flowers and monsters coexist. The image is also what provides both a flight of fancy (the kind that might preoccupy an imaginative young man in a quiet town) as well as a marker of time and place (the kind that triggers memories as we grow older).

Although Pjota has pursued many different avenues since his early exhibitions, he always comes back to the ideas that initially inspired him: ‘At art school I tried to be more conceptual, but I realized I already had a vocabulary, one that I learned when I was 12. I’m using that again now and making what I think is my best work.’