Jorge Selarón

Biography

In 1994 the residents of the street painted the stairway to the Convent of Santa Teresa green and yellow for the football World Cup. Over that paint a Chilean who lived in the house right by the steps began laying tiles. There was no money and no helpers either; he sold his paintings and went on laying tiles.

Jorge Selarón was born in 1947 in Limache, a small town an hour’s journey from Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, into a family of modest means. At ten he visited Buenos Aires and, as he put it, decided to see the world; at seventeen he left for Europe by ship. He lived by giving tennis lessons, sold paintings in restaurants, crossed the whole of Europe and got as far as India. He counted fifty-seven countries before he chose Rio de Janeiro. He never studied painting anywhere.

In the 1980s he settled in Lapa, a poor district at the foot of the Santa Teresa hill, in a house facing a stairway of 215 steps. From 1990 he began to fit it out: first he set old bathtubs with flowers on the pavements, then painted them and faced them with tiles, keeping in mind, as he himself said, the Park Güell in Barcelona. From 1994 the tiles went onto the steps themselves. By 2000 all 215 steps over 125 metres of climb were covered; then came the side walls and pavements, while the stairway itself, as its author intended, remained a “changing work”: he was forever taking something off and relaying it. After 2000 red appeared, the colour he called “Ferrari”, the most beautiful in the world. Tiles were sent from all over the world: more than two thousand different tiles from sixty-odd countries. To keep the work going he had, by his own count, painted and sold more than 25,000 pictures, almost always on a single subject: a pregnant Black woman. The figure is hard to check.

In 2003 the first film was made about him, “Selarón: The Great Madness”.

In May 2005 the city listed the stairway as a landmark, and Selarón was made an honorary citizen of Rio de Janeiro. In 2005–2006 he built a pyramid of bathtubs at the entrance, in 2007 he began paving the pavement at the foot of the Lapa aqueduct, but after protests the work was stopped, and in 2012 the city authorities demolished it. In 2010 he finished the large flag in the upper part of the stairway, at the corner of Rua Pinto Martins. The stairway was filmed for videos by U2 and Snoop Dogg, for the film “Hulk” and the series “CSI: Miami”, and it went into Rio’s bid for the 2016 Olympic Games. In a documentary of 2010 he said that the stairway would be finished only on the day of his death, when he himself would become the stairway.

On the morning of 10 January 2013 Jorge Selarón was found dead on the steps of his stairway. He was sixty-five.