What is graffiti nowadays? In Portugal, in recent years, several artists, exhibitions and galleries have sought to answer this question and redefine it, given the broader international context. We immediately think of names like the Underdogs collective, recognized abroad; or recent exhibitions such as Interferências at MAAT, which presented numerous perspectives on this subject. Graffiti, more than ever, seems to be making its way from walls to museums and galleries. It is increasingly valued in institutional circuits, understood as an inspiration and an inevitable visual reference. This phenomenon is not so recent, but it seems to me to be increasingly on the rise.

The Kids are Alright, the most recent exhibition by the artist duo primeira desordem, at Galeria Monitor, continues this trend. They are not only consciously aware of this transformation: they also react to it. The impetus for this response seems to be the conversion of graffiti into sculpture, a more accepted and glamorized form in the cultural and institutional mainstream. The white pieces, although they appear to be made of stone, almost identical to the gallery walls, are made of perishable Styrofoam. There is irony in this act: the immovable hardness is seemingly fragile, a satirical appetite that marks the duo’s work from the beginning; yet there is a surprise in the technique used: the way the immediate plasticity of spray paint, often dripping down the figures, is transferred to a physical object.

The imagery is urban, pop, violent, comic. The figures are visual vents – guns, phalluses, smileys, symbols. For example, we find comical titles, originating in jargon, like Legalize Alverca, in a work representing a marijuana leaf. There is this marginal, provocative, immediatist tendency and a permanent reference to an Anglocentric context, which is the globalism through which we speak today. The works were based on graffiti that the artists found in the Greater Lisbon area. Possibly criminal acts converted into valuables – the responsive impulse to this situation, the appropriation of what for some might be a crime and for others an artistic expression, is intelligently ironized by the artists through the sculptural form, which neither replaces nor annuls, but rather comments upon.

The exhibition text stresses this notion of crime several times. It ends up appearing not in the execution of the works, but in their arrangement – the way they multiply in space, clustering almost randomly, in a simulated vandalism on the gallery walls. This simulation leads us again to the transfer of power. In an exhibition, graffiti does not have the same reading or danger as a drawing on a wall. Its purpose is different on the walls of a gallery; it is decontextualized, institutionalized, becomes a hollow vestige. The white coating seems another hallmark of this. At first, it might make one wonder if there isn’t an apathetic side to the reconversion into a bland solemnity, an appropriation along the lines of Daniel Arsham’s kitsch idealism. I don’t think this comparison is fair, given the way the figures flutter expressively, subtly, emerging in a prescient, high-relief paint. For example, the curvatures of the last work, Friendly Ghost, a key element in the exhibition’s context. All the pieces are ghostly, the shadow of something they are not truly, but which they attempt to replicate. What’s more, the awareness of this status as legitimized, self-ironic replicas reveals their richness – The Kids are Alright was also the title of a song by The Who, which in the exhibition text is described as “an anthem of London’s Mod subculture, composed of a middle-class youth who, in the 60s, in a stable post-war situation and “with money in their pockets”, had a bohemian lifestyle, valuing fashion, music, nightclubs, cosmopolitan life, and everything deemed modern”. The show is based on this provocative, self-critical remark, but that is also the guiding map.

The Kids Are Alright, by primeira desordem, is at Galeria Monitor until October 29.