On the corner of Plaza and Olzabal in Buenos Aires there is a park hedged on two sides by the exposed brickwork of the adjoining buildings. It’s midday, overcast, a light breeze is shaking the park’s only tree. Otherwise nothing, no one. But if you look more closely you are not alone. To the right of the tree, a man is standing on a crate, running a pole up and down a wall. You can barely make him out against the grey-brown edifice. He is not tall, even when standing on his tip-toes. His clothes and face are slathered in paint. A giant white circle is taking shape two stories above him – a head, a planet, the pap of a flower? It is difficult to say. This diminutive, almost slight young person is Blu, one of the most innovative artists working on the streets today.

Soon his Italian friends join him. First Ivan and Lorenzo who are recording the experience on a video camera for the Italian film production company Mercurio. They hope to refine almost 80 hours of footage into a documentary film about a trip devoted to Blu’s painting that has taken two months and spanned Central and South America: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and now Argentina. “We’ve got 80 hours of little kids playing football and dogs fighting,” jokes Ivan. And then there is Sibe, a gamine, a girl with short black hair, an infectious smile; she is often reading a book in the grass while her boyfriend Blu paints.

She has watched Blu’s early graffiti in his hometown of Bologna, Italy develop into the immense mythical figures that now distinguish his work. “We’ve come to find inspiration in the streets of Latin America,” Lorenzo tells me.

Blu paints from sun up until sun down. There is an almost primordial rhythm to his work. He is finishing his piece at the park on Olzabal as dusk settles. The white circle, the head, is now attached to a body stooping towards the playground, its feet brushing the tree branches. We can only look up at Blu who is perched on his ladder, thinking. Marc Schiller, the founder of a prominent website devoted to urban art called woostercollective.com, tells me that Blu is ‘a spiritual leader in the street art movement…someone who instinctively understands his surroundings’. A boy kicks a soccer ball towards the tree and runs right into Blu and the painting. “What is it?” he asks, slightly delighted. “What do you think?” says Blu.

All of Blu’s pieces inspire shock. As if the wall suddenly crept up on the person instead of the other way around. This is their peculiar power – to reinvigorate the space, to give each wall a life. In the enormous piece on Ozabal the figure kneels uncomfortably. This is a theme in Blu’s work, which, until now, appeared on walls mainly in European cities. Blu paints men, giants contorted into awkward poses, twisted so far in one direction that they’ve split apart. These bodies are almost formless – what seems to matter is not the figure but this moment of breakage when all the demons come spilling out. In one picture, on a wall in Zaragoza, Spain, a corpse-white man unravels his intestines into the shape of heart. In another, in Genoa, a giant man has peeled off his face to reveal a hollow grooved interior out of which smaller men struggle to climb. Rib cages become prison bars. Eyes become headlights. For Blu the human body is a kind of malfunctioning machine. It excretes and regurgitates and defecates. It breaks down—it is prone to decay. This makes his work, with its tendency towards the grotesque, immediately recognisable. Blu paints humans who have lost control of their own bodies.

The notion that humans are autonomous or somehow self-contained is exactly the illusion street art seeks to shatter. Painting becomes a communal activity. Women carrying groceries stop to ask questions. Games of football start. Local artists from Doma TV stop by to swap ideas. The police show up. Blu relishes these interruptions. He says they are the reason he makes art in the street.

A few days later I start to understand what he means. Blu is creating one of his most striking paintings at a vacant lot on Holmberg in the neighbourhood of Belgrano. It is also one of his largest – stretching the entire length of the building, almost half a city block. In the image a giant man, lying on his back, has parts of his body cut away, exposing a kind of enormous indoor city. The whole neighbourhood is suddenly different. The dogs are barking. A woman strides onto the patch of grass where Blu is working. “What is this?” she asks, almost frantically. “Is it a factory?” “I’m just the artist,” Blu says with an impish little grin. The picture draws every conceivable type. A group of construction workers are standing on the corner. They’re smiling with their arms folded. “I don’t know much about art,” one of them says, “but I like it a lot.” An elderly nun pats my head. A man with wild white hair yells something from a moving car. Ronald Kennedy, a retired architect, is using the occasion to lecture his nephew about the nature of art. “It looks like a train station. The little men inside are the big one’s friends,” says the 11-year-old. “It’s very good,” he pauses emphatically, “the picture has movement.” The adults burst out laughing.

To paint on a wall in Latin America is never an innocent act. The wall is a place for political slogans. It is the surface against which partisans are shot. Even Blu’s work, which is not obviously political, draws strangers together. “This type of thing would never have been possible under the dictatorship,” explains Ronald. The danger involved in painting walls underscores the fact that Blu is not a normal artist. Blu is an artist on the run. Running between the rooftops, above our heads. He is stretching out on a ladder to reach a high wall or crouching on an electrical crate to reach a low wall. He does not ask permission. He simply paints. “To do something without asking permission…it’s a way of expressing yourself,” he tells me. In Europe it is very difficult to paint. Lorenzo recounts a story about police vans in Germany. In the countries they’ve visited in Latin America the difference between legal and illegal art is less clear. “In Guatemala and Mexico City we were more concerned about tagging over gang graffiti than with the police.” In the end the streets welcomed them; the murals they made with local artists and street kids in places like San Jose, Costa Rica attest to the lasting impact of their trip.

When they arrived in Buenos Aires, the last stop on their voyage, Blu noticed the walls first. This is how he experiences a new city. He skips the great monuments and museums, the wide pedestrian thoroughfares; he looks instead for the dingy remainders, the points at which the city falls apart. “How are the walls in Buenos Aires different from those in other cities you’ve visited?” Each city, he says, has completely different walls. “In Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, the walls are very low because an earthquake razed the city in 1972. But street art adapts to these circumstances. Nicaragua has a ton of artists working in the street.” In Guatemala – a richer country – it is too dangerous. Walls are not used for painting. “And Buenos Aires itself?” Blu gestures up at his painting on Holmberg. “Take this wall,” he says. “I am attracted to it because it is complex, it has a history. A building was destroyed to create this wall.” He draws my attention to an old porthole window that is now the giant reclining man’s eye. “This window is ancient, they aren’t made anymore. This was the starting point for the piece.” “So your work is a kind of collaboration with the pre-existing structure?” “Yes and no. Because in a sense each wall already tells the whole story, it’s all there, I only happen upon it.” Each time he finds a wall it is an accident, a completely fortuitous event. In Europe things are kept tidy for the tourists. But in Buenos Aires these walls that bear their scars on the surface are still waiting to be discovered.

When Blu finds his wall he improvises. There are no plans. Yet as his painting becomes more intricate, as the arms and legs and head take shape, it begins to look as if it had always been there. It is too gigantic for this stooping garrulous man to have painted. At most he’s colouring in. He could be the man hired to paint over the graffiti.

The picture resurfaces the wall, the wall resurfaces. Porteños walk past their block on Holmberg as if for the first time.

In a quiet moment, sipping a beer, Lorenzo, Sibe and Ivan stop to consider whether the giant man on Holmberg is done. Blu is there too. He is serene, very quiet. He is saving himself for the paint, the paint which covers his whole body. He not only understands these walls. He wants us to change the way we inhabit them. In this sense his art inherits its aspirations from the modernist avant-gardes. It seizes on their notion that art might alter and reorder everyday life in the city for the better. Today you need a ticket to see the Surrealists. But Blu’s work will never get lost in the museum. His art shares the same fate as the wall — it will live and die on the street.

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