Rafael Sliks is an artist born in São Paulo (1981), where he grew up observing street signs through the gap in his home’s gate in the Bela Vista neighborhood. This early influence on his creative process, along with the unique way he incorporates street writing into his art, is what makes him a world-renowned Street Writer. His murals and canvas works can be found in various parts of the world, and he has participated in publications, festivals, art fairs, and exhibitions across the United States, Asia, and Europe. More recently, he held a solo exhibition in Japan and painted a large-scale mural on the side of a building in the metropolis where he was born.
“Sliks” is a neologism coined by the artist, formed by reversing the word “skills.” The term — meaning ability, dexterity, and the capacity to swiftly and efficiently execute a conscious gesture or objective — is deeply aligned with his artistic practice. Sliks’ great maneuver is transforming the “tag” — a form of quick, illegal street writing—into something legible and appreciable for art enthusiasts and collectors. With refinement and technical mastery worthy of a scholar of urban lettering, his work has been gaining increasing visibility in the visual arts world.
Rafael Sliks connects with the ancestral technique of painting through his pragmatic use of oil, and with a broad color palette he enters into direct dialogue with art history. In his canvases, urban art is deconstructed until it becomes a kind of tangled forest—a subjective fauna in which the artist revisits the abstract painters’ desire to reach the essence of spirituality. By breaking down his writing and moving toward abstraction in search of an “essential nothingness,” Sliks reinterprets the urban landscape, reclaiming the nature that once preceded it. At this point, he aligns himself with the tradition of abstract painting that seeks to de-humanize art through continuous deconstruction, going beyond representation and inviting viewers to co-create the reality imagined by the artist.
A hallmark of his practice is incessant repetition. Like a mantra, Sliks writes and rewrites his name obsessively until entering a trance, forcing his calligraphy to escape itself and reach another state—one that moves away from conventional written language. If graffiti is already a way of proposing alternative modes of writing, Sliks radicalizes this attempt. If tagging is inherently transgressive, he pushes that transgression to its limits, taking the handstyle of graffiti to its final consequences. Rafael approaches calligraphy as a kind of street kung-fu—a yogi unconcerned with painting or writing in themselves, but with refining the conscious movements of the body in each executed gesture.
His works reclaim the body within the visual arts, functioning as records of his physicality. His dynamic aligns with contemporary art, as the repeated action of inscribing his name — through different techniques and on various surfaces — results in works that behave as performance documentation. When we see his paintings, videos, and murals, we can feel the “spray-action” energy of his bodily movements — the artist’s gestures are always explicit, serving as the guiding thread of his production.
In 2025, Sliks took part in the 6th edition of the Vulica Brasil festival in Brasília by “wrapping” the Darcy Ribeiro Building, in the Conic neighborhood, with his artwork “Tags”.
