“Cleaning is not a crime.  What is a crime is the environmental damage caused by unashamed polluting,” states Alexandre Orion, a Brazilian artist based near San Paulo.
When someone cleans as exquisitely as Alexandre it becomes clear how much this world needs more creative people like him to bring light on environmental issues in non-threatening ways.

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As shown in the video above, the police could not stop him from cleaning the tunnel so they washed his work away.  What isn’t shown is that the municipal workers only washed the part of the tunnel with the art, “contrary to my (Alexandre’s) expectation.”  Thus the artist went back a second time and finished his mural which was then washed by the state again.  Following that tunnel, they continued to clean the rest of the tunnels in San Paulo but, “they will all be dirty again in less than 4 months.  It would be better to stop polluting instead of cleaning up.”

Alexandre then takes his environmental methods a few steps further.  He brings back the towels used for cleaning, extracts the soot by wetting them and squeezing the dirty water out into a jar, letting it evaporate and finishes the process by mixing the dried soot with an acrylic medium and paints with it as shown in the below video.

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Paul “Moose” Curtis is a self proclaimed “Professor of Dirt” originally from Manchester and is one of earliest reverse graffiti artists, if not the pioneer.  For the Broadway tunnel in San Francisco, he made cutouts and used power washers to “stencil” silhouettes of indigenous plants from California.  The above photo and the video below document the project that he did in 2008 for Green Works, an all natural cleaning products line.

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Moose was a stage manager and builder back in the day as well as a roadie for Stevie Wonder and Whitney Houston.  He now runs an eco-marketing firm called Symbollix based in East Sussex, England and has done projects for the in initially “confused” authorities (who charged him with the Anti-Social Behaviour Act) such as the Metropolitan Police and the Greater London Authority as well as big name brands such as Smirnoff.

There are some other reverse graffiti artists out there but I haven’t seen it really catch on like spray painting.  As an ephemeral form of art, I’d think that more eco-artists would use this concept and apply it to their own work.  Has anyone else seen any projects similar to these anywhere?

Note: I realize that some of these projects are a little old news, but I feel that it’s important to spread the love and possibly reach people who haven’t been exposed yet.

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