Secondary Market
Cranio
Brazilian, born 1982
Cranio is the street name of Fabio de Oliveira Parnaiba, a Brazilian artist born in São Paulo in 1982. His blue Indigenous figure, caught up in the rituals of modern consumer life, turns humour into a pointed comment on consumerism, deforestation and the place of Brazil’s first peoples.
Biography
Cranio, born Fabio de Oliveira Parnaiba in São Paulo in 1982, began painting the city’s grey walls in 1998, in the hip-hop and graffiti culture that also shaped Os Gêmeos, whom he names among his influences alongside Salvador Dalí and cartoons. The name is a school nickname: crânio means “skull” in Portuguese, and is also slang for a bright student.
The blue figure
Around 2008 Cranio created the character that now identifies his work anywhere: an Indigenous man painted in vivid blue. He drops this figure into situations borrowed from contemporary consumer life and lets the mismatch do the talking. Under the comedy runs a consistent message about Indigenous rights, the destruction of the Amazon and a society that measures everything in money — the subject of his Barcelona exhibition AMORE$ in 2015.
Walls and galleries
His murals have been documented in São Paulo, London, Berlin, Paris and Madrid, in Barcelona’s Poblenou district, where he painted a large wall for the Big Walls project in 2014, and in Berwyn, Illinois (2018). In the gallery, solo exhibitions include Cotidianos in Barcelona (2014), Amazonian Diet at Vroom & Varossieau, Amsterdam (2016), Jungle at Vertical Gallery, Chicago (2018), Homem Primata, Capitalismo Selvagem at Luis Maluf Art Gallery, São Paulo (2019), which brought together thirty sculptures with paintings and prints, and ¥€$ at StolenSpace Gallery, London (2023).
Museum presentations
In 2018 Cranio took part in UN-DERSTAND: The Power of Art as a Social Architect at Urban Nation, Berlin’s museum for urban contemporary art. In 2024 his installation I Buy Trees was shown at the UrbanArt Biennale in the former Völklingen ironworks, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Germany.