a conversation with os gemeos

A CONVERSATION WITH OS GEMEOS
You are natives of São
Paolo; what impact has
the city had on your work?
It was a spiritual exercise. Inside
our mind there is a movie going
on, which is an endless source of
ideas for our creation process.
São Paolo made us who we are.
We grew up playing in the streets
in the 1980s. We would go out to
play football and see someone
doing graffiti, someone else break
dancing and another person making toys out of wood. It was an
environment that called on us to
improvise.
Do the colours and the
subject matter found in
your work reflect your
urban surroundings?
The colours we choose are simply a reflection of how we see the
world. Some neighbourhoods are
vibrant and colourful and others
are staid and gray—São Paolo has
a lot of contradictory aspects.
The influences on our work are
simple: our dreams, going back to
our roots, perusing books and coming into contact with new people.
We like to surround ourselves with
new energy.
We began creating our own
world when we began painting;
it was our way to escape from
the daily stress. As children, we
drew a lot, which was a way for
us to communicate not just with
one another, but also with our
family and friends. As we spoke
to each other through drawings,
we discovered that with just a
piece paper and a pen we could
slip away from the outside world.
How do you work together;
is there a "division of
labour" for each project?
All of the creation is done together;
it is a natural process. We complement each other to become one
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and there are no set roles as to who
does what. We live in our dream
world twenty-four hours a day and
our art is a way of putting outside
what we find inside.
We live more inside of our drawings
than outside; sometimes it’s difficult for us to relate to the outside
world as there are a lot of rules, so
we prefer to stay inside our head,
where we don’t need to explain
ourselves too much.
form may not be important, as artists we need to know where we
are and understand the rules that
govern that space, whether it’s the
street or in a gallery.
message into the consumer’s
home. It was a fluid process for
us to go from one format, like
the street, to another, like the
bottle label.
The simple fact of painting a
mural or doing a museum show
means that we are relating to and
communicating with the public
and letting them be part of our
painting.
What drew you to
Hennessy?
What brought you and
Hennessy together for
the Very Special Limited
Edition?
Hennessy is not just a drink to
us, it’s a history. The world has
changed over time, but they work
to preserve tradition. We take a
similar approach in our work—we
draw what we believe in and we
aim to preserve those visions.
We got involved in the project
thanks to Lenny from Futura [Lenny, or Leonard McGurr,
partnered with the Maison for
the 2013 Hennessy Very Special
Limited Edition]. We’ve done illustrations for magazines and
other publications and we loved
the idea of doing the label because it represented a new medium for us that could carry our
How did you evolve from
working on the streets to
showing in galleries and
museums?
© Robin / robin-photo.com
We don’t see it as stopping the
streets and going to the museum,
for us the street and the museum
is all one medium. We don’t put
our projects into cubbyholes; the
venue is an instrument that allows
us to paint our visions—it doesn’t
matter where. Although the plat-
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