Venezuelan street artist Ramon Brito on contemporary art

Ramon B (GarabatoArte) sits atop a wooden mural he created for landscapist Gautam Muralidharan's terrace garden in Versova. He used a mix of acrylic, oil and watercolours for the creative flooring for terrace parties. Pic/Satej Shinde

Garabatoarte's work is a direct riposte to those who believe that art should be only about aesthetics, conveying a multitude of viewpoints without ever taking sides. This is the problem that the late Italian novelist Umberto Eco called ‘the open work'. You can read everything in a contemporary work of art, so there's no use in trying to actually say something outside self-expression. However, that isn't what GarabatoArte believes.

A visitor at Art Basel in Miami watches a short film by the artist for his Triturarte series on can sculptures and mixed media art. He devised the working headphones out of waste cans

For him, it is possible for contemporary art to convey an ethic by connecting people with their deeper sense of what is right or wrong. For this very reason, his works aren't restricted to the canvas. They encompass digital art, the short film format, sculptures and wall murals.

The artist created a mammoth elephant sculpture from cans for agricultural space Indigo Green, on the outskirts of Mumbai

Art in the everyday
We met the Venezuelan artist - whose real name is Ramon Brito - just before he left India after a prolific six-month stint. He was invited by an Indian artist-filmmaker to explore the country and bring murals to life in Pune and Mumbai. "They combine the message of recycling with endangered species and our precarious future if we continue ‘consuming' things at the current rate," he says.

What's on the mind is on the canvas in this quirky digital painting from an earlier collection

Back in Miami, Ramon is an animator, filmmaker and art director. The bespectacled artist's day job involves art direction for animated films and music videos by mainstream acts Sean Paul, Pitbull and Daddy Yankee, but he'd rather be known for his work as GarabatoArte, which roughly translates from Spanish to "crushed art". His motif is the everyday can that has seeped into urban life through colas and soft drinks.

Mariquita is Ramon's wall mural in Pune that shows an artificial future of the disappearing ladybug

"I started dabbling in short films and animation five years ago, and then moved to digital art in a serious way," he says. His work began gaining face after he pasted stickers all over the streets of New York and Miami, and turned the act into a short film on recycling. "If we humans don't change our path of environmental destruction, the end of our ecosystems eventually means the end of us," he says.

The can artist
Cans entered his artistic aesthetic somewhere along the way, and have become the motif in his paintings and unusual metal sculptures. "The challenge is to achieve a 3D piece with the greatest possible amount of recycled materials." The quest has led him to create mammoth sculptures of elephants on his Indian stint. "This ancient mammal is dying because of our high speed cars, barbed wire walls and routes full of trains," he says when you ask about the inspiration for the piece. GarabatoArte promises to return and create more hara-kiri. He says, "I met the most amazing people here. I'm hoping to come back soon."

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