Art for all

Once there was a small, lost boy. He searched under rocks and beyond his shadow, but he never found himself. He played with the stars and whispered secrets to the clouds, kept by the wind. He called out to the tallest mountains and the oldest elders, but no one answered.

One day he was leaping planet to planet collecting dreams when he tripped over a can that rang like a bell. He took it and pressed its head, and a big flame of color flooded everything, and the ground was no longer the ground, nor the sky the sky, everything was color, color was everything. He looked at it and went blind from it. The boy was amazed. Suddenly a brightness made him close his eyes, and when he opened them again he saw a small boy in front of him, watching him.

"Who are you?" he asked. The small boy smiled and touched his hand.
"I'm your smile," he said gently, becoming light and melting into his arm, his shoulder, into him. The small, lost boy took a breath and looked up, smiled, and heard the wind tell him something beautiful.

Ever since that day, the boy has leaped from planet to planet hunting dreams and painting his path, and in this way reflects himself
searches for himself
finds himself.

The modern little prince in question is not a storybook character, but rather Granada-based graffiti artist Raúl Ruiz, commonly known by his nom de plume, el niño de las pinturas (the boy of the paintings). The niño, or Sex, as he also signs his name, is responsible for much of the graffiti in and around Granada.

Walk anywhere in the city, and you're likely to notice the art in the unlikeliest of places... beside the windows on gray stone shops, on the sides of houses, along roadside walls, among the winding streets of the ancient Albaicín neighborhood...

The city as museum.

Graffiti art is, by its very nature, ephemeral, fragile. The scrawled names of urban travelers, messages waiting to be deciphered, drawings, paintings, portraits, there one day, the next painted over with a fresh coat of paint, washed away with rain, faded by pollution.

It is subversive, challenging traditional definitions of public and private space, and how we use them. Its artists, urban guerrillas painting the city under the cover of night, fleeing policeman and thousand euro fines.

But if the city is a gallery, it's one with no explanatory labels and no artist biographies. The art must speak for itself ... not as a monologue, but in dialogue with those who view it. Perhaps it is for this reason that el niño has said that "it is the onlooker who makes the painting." After all, urban spaces are not static nor uniform: they are constructed by each individual as he experiences them. An artist can paint the city with his lived experiences, but once he has gone, it is up to the passerby to interpret what he sees, through a worldview that's his own.

Now it's your turn: take a digital stroll through some of el niño's art, and if you have the chance, come to Granada to make your own path through the museum.

"Making things I break, to put them together again, and to break them again, that's how I spend my time... and time runs out ... and life doesn't wait."

"Time doesn't exist."

Is it art, a social project, an act of rebellion...?
It's up to us to decide.

Check out more of el niño's graffiti on the obras section of his website, and don't miss the neat panoramas.