Portuguese artist born in 1987, Ricardo Passaporte has created a body of artworks largely dedicated to brands that shape our everyday lives like Lidl, Footlocker, and Tesco. He depicts the ordinariness of the society through the lenses of consumerism. The artist’s artworks are deeply engaged with Graffiti and somehow Pop Art, emphasizing the same repetitive, identity-driven practice of the corporate logos. Through his art, Passaporte innovatively portraits the relationship between brands and consumers.

I like the immediacy, the strength, and the purity of the shapes of your artworks, it requires a great ability of synthesis. what does creating art mean for you?
For me creating art is much about putting out emotions and feelings in a visual way, with as little filters as possible. In that sense, I like your observation of immediate and pure expression.

What does spark your curiosity and motivation? Tell me more about your creative process and your source of inspiration.
I’m really fascinated by things that are created unpretentiously. It can be a drawing by a five years old child or a chair of an eighty years old person. I remember the first time a saw a piece by Bill Traylor, I felt that it was the purest piece I’ve ever seen. That is the same feeling I sometimes have when I see naïve graffiti or messages of love on the streets. I guess that is what moves me, I would love to achieve that kind of freedom and total lack of worries about what comes out.

Your work has been associated to pop art and graffiti, do you actually see your art connected to these artistic movements?
I can understand there is an obvious connection since graffiti has always been a part of my life. I’ve been writing on walls since a young age and I’m still doing it with my group Germes Gang. However, they are different practices with diverse goals and languages, thus I would say that the connection is being different parts of myself.

You use different mediums, employing the techniques with a naïve result. When artists chose to obtain this kind of effect in their artworks, a common audience may be led to think that it is due to a lack of ability in depicting the reality in a figurative way, without realizing that it is a mean to deliver a message. Therefore, why did you choose to obtain such a dewy effect in your artwork? Is that part of your communication strategy?
There is no strategy since there is no problem to solve or goals to achieve. The artistic languages and aesthetics are the result of a very personal and intimate process.And talking specifically about my own language, the apparent floppiness is because I force myself to be spontaneous and leave space for mistakes, so I can be surprised by each piece. I think that a focus on a skillful technique can be very interesting, but it doesn’t work for me. For me, it would be like working in a bank because it requires discipline and methodology

There are many brands that shaped our society from a social and economic point of view, thus, and why did you pick companies such as Lidl, Tesco, and Ikea instead of others?
Those are part of the common European human being's life. I really like the ordinariness of consumerism and the casualness of the brands that surround us, which are part of our everyday life. Those three among with Footlocker are big brands that we are forced to live with and somehow I create an unconscious relation, maybe because of their aesthetic or what they represent.

Nowadays, the usage of social media as a channel of communication is unavoidable and artists have essentially become marketers. Don’t you think that copying with digital channels is another form of automatism? How do you cope with the paradox of accessibility to the masses and the sense of rarity associated with the arts?
Yes, I agree with that but seeing an image on Instagram doesn’t make it accessible. You can be aware of some things that you couldn’t before.

Do you have any new project you are working on that you would like to share with us? What do you think will be your next goals for the future?
Currently, I am preparing a new body of work, a bit different from that one I was doing in 2018. Ihave one group exhibition in October 2019 in Lisbon and one duo show in California in 2020 confirmed. There are two more exhibitions to be confirmed for 2020.