STOCKHOLM, SWeden.- Moderna Museet presents Paulo Climachauska, through March 20. Paulo Climachauska was born in 1962 in S鉶 Paulo, Brazil. In the course of ten dark November days, using black marker pens, he and assistants Juliana Landgraf and Tacia Costa have created a wall drawing at Moderna Museet that is over 20 metre long and 3.5 metre high. The drawing on the wall in the corridor outside the collection rooms is a portrait of Tyghuset, a building that can be seen through the windows opposite the wall. Museum visitors have questioned this particular view and the location of the corridor.

Paulo Climachauska磗 wall drawings are often portraits of the building in which they are drawn. The most recent example is his work for the 2004 S鉶 Paulo Biennial, where he used one of the walls of the biennial pavilion (designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1954) to create an inverted portrait of the characteristic, organic story structure of the building. Tyghuset is not really a part of Moderna Museet but appears to be so when seen through the large windows. The most distinguishing feature of Paulo Climachauska's wall drawings is neither their size nor their subject matter but the fact that the drawings are constructed entirely of subtractions, which is only revealed on close inspection. Each line consists of a number of figures that are subtracted until the sum is zero. As a viewer, one is first struck by the effort, precision and brainwork that have gone into the drawing. Paulo Climachauska's intention, however, is not to impress or excel in mathematical constructions. His message is explicitly political and his subtractions carry a wish for a new social order. He proposes a different economical and political system, built on subtraction rather than addition. Paulo Climachauska's art conveys the idea that we would benefit not by maximising but by reducing, cutting down and minimising. Our lives can have a richer content without us having to become materially richer.

The subtractions are also a comment on Brazil's dynamic modernist heritage. The wall drawings that Paulo Climachauska has created in Brazil often depict the large modernist buildings for which the country is famous. This kind of 'tropical modernism', mainly by Brazil's uncrowned king of architecture, Oscar Niemeyer (born in 1907 and still active), has put its mark on the country ever since its capital Brasilia was founded in 1956, with Niemeyer as chief architect. Since then, his buildings have spread across Brazil. They are often extensive and can be characterised as the country's showpiece buildings. A typical example is the apartment complex Copan in central S鉶 Paulo, South America's largest concrete building. Paulo Climachauska reduces the importance of these buildings by drawing them with subtractions.