Fairies or swastikas
There’s graffiti as art and graffiti as abuse. Achilleas Michaelides knows the difference
For a city that boasts a cabaret on virtually every corner you’d imagine there’d be no fuss over naked fairies appearing in a mural. So the man who painted them last month was understandably dismayed when officials in Limassol ordered his work to be erased.
“Before I drew on that wall there were obscene messages sprayed on it, with swastikas and racist messages. If they prefer that to having fairies and flowers and butterflies on the wall, then that’s their choice,” says Achilleas Michaelides, the artist better known as Paparazzi.
Today the wall is blank once more – almost. The obscene graffiti is back.
Paparazzi had originally been asked to decorate the wall by Gifts and Gadgets, a company organising a graffiti festival which had the backing of the Limassol council.
The colourful confection soon caused controversy. First, an individual municipal councillor objected to the fairies’ naked breasts. Paparazzi covered them up.
Then, the owner of the wall of the house on Saripolou Street objected to the whole mural and threatened legal action. Limassol council had little choice. The wall went blank, for a time.
Chatting to him, I felt uneasy about my tendency to insist on the negative – the censorship at the festival – while all he really wanted to talk about was his art.
“Grafitti allows you to express your imagination freely,” he says. “It’s a contemporary form of artistic expression that unites young people. When someone passes by a new place and sees graffiti, he is receiving a message. Graffiti is done outdoors and is visible to anyone, so everybody can receive its positive messages.”
Michaelides is originally from Georgia and moved to Greece when he was 12 years old. As a teenager he saw graffiti in streets and was immediately drawn to it.
“I liked the intense, expressive colours. I approached D71, who is a popular graffiti artist, and I showed him some of my paintings. He said I have a ‘good hand’ and could get into graffiti. D71 then took me to a shop that sold sprays for graffiti. I started buying material from there and within a year that shop became my sponsor.”
To be a bona fide graffiti artist, you need a tag or a signature name. “At school I was one of the few kids who were into hip-hop, and back then in the 1990s rapper Xzibit came out with a song titled ‘Paparazzi’. I kept singing it to the other kids so they started calling me ‘Paparazzi’. It became my nickname and I kept it as my graffiti tag,” he says.
The term ‘tag’ was actually invented by a Greek-American in the early 1970s, who lived in Washington Heights in Manhattan and went round spraying ‘TAKI 183” on city walls. His tag was a combination of his name Dimitris/Dimitrakis, hence Takis and his street number, 183.
Paparazzi has been living in Nicosia for five years now and is presently in a position to make a living out of his art. He does graffiti for bars, shops, luna-parks, even living rooms. He also does body-painting, as well as airbrushing for cars, bikes and guitars.
“But graffiti is special for me, and I love it a bit more than the other forms of artistic expression,” he says.
“When I arrived in Cyprus five years ago, the majority of people were not familiar with graffiti so they kept their distance. People thought graffiti was just about spraying slogans on walls. But there are, of course, a lot of people who have been abroad and are well-informed. In my experience, when people see my work, they begin trusting me more.”
Limassol City Council has actually contacted Paparazzi to discuss a project in cooperation with the Youth Board to teach graffiti techniques to young kids. “The aim is to get kids off the streets, prevent them from doing harmful things. If there’s a venue for them to go and express themselves, they won’t go round spraying obscenities on walls,” Paparazzi says.
Paparazzi’s other future plans are as bold and bright as his graffiti and include entering the Guiness Book of Records for the biggest graffiti by a single artist. “I also want to travel the world and leave my mark in each country by drawing graffiti. And my ultimate dream is to exhibit my work in a modern art museum.”
It’s not an outrageous aim. Graffiti art has indeed entered galleries and museums, a notable example is the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, which features a collection of graffiti work.
This acceptability begs the question of whether it is possible for something that started as an underground movement to retain its authenticity and at the same time feature on living room walls and museums.
“I used to go and spray illegally on trains and walls – I’m not saying I didn’t. But now I also do graffiti in houses, decorating swimming pools or living room walls. It is how I make a living, and I’m proud of that.
“I don’t think the fact that graffiti has entered the living room means it’s no longer an underground form of expression. Graffiti artists around the world continue to express themselves on the streets. Some of these people have been doing this for decades and have become popular and established. They may sell a painting for thousands of pounds and at the same time go to alternative festivals, at their own expense, to spray on street walls to fulfill their creativity.”
All of which begs another question. Is graffiti on living room walls just the latest middle class trend?
“A trend is something that comes and goes. Graffiti has been with us since the 1960s and is still going strong. It’s not going anywhere.”
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