Exhibit of the week: Os Gemeos

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston

Through Nov. 25

It’s the 70-foot-tall painting that has half of Boston in a tizzy, said Greg Cook in The Boston Phoenix. To call attention to a small new show at the ICA that celebrates their work, Brazilian street artists Os Gemeos (The Twins) covered one wall of a building in downtown Dewey Square with an enormous cartoon image of a boy with his head wrapped in a red shirt or jacket that obscures most of his face. The mural, titled The Giant of Boston, looks like a terrorist to some: One local interviewed by the local Fox News affiliate called him “Bart Simpson in a Mujahideen outfit.” But a better label came from the station’s Facebook page, who called the mural “a Rorschach test for idiots and racists,” said Hrag Vartanian in Salon.com. All this talk about the Giant being an assassin is ridiculous. Clearly, he’s a graffiti artist.

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The terrorist interpretation is at least “slightly off the mark,” said Sebastian Smee in The Boston Globe. Twin brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo have dressed their “unwaveringly cute” characters in the same headgear before, invoking a look that graffiti artists adopted long ago to hide their identities and protect their lungs from spray-paint fumes. In any Os Gemeos mural, such headwear functions as “a sign of tribal belonging and an emblem of urban defiance.” But it’s a shame that this mural has spooked some observers, because it’s “by far the most successful piece of public art” that Boston has seen in years. It completely transforms Dewey Square. “Unlike the modernist, abstract steel sculptures one routinely sees in gray and disconsolate corporate plazas, this is an intervention that feels entirely unexpected and frankly joyous.”

Surprisingly, an Os Gemeos painting “can be absolutely brilliant just hung on a wall by itself too,” said R.J. Rushmore in the street-art blog Vandalog.com. At the ICA exhibit, “I practically couldn’t look away from Upside Down Sunrise (2012),” which features a character with a guitar standing right side up in an upside-down house, or an untitled painting, owned by cyclist Lance Armstrong, of graffiti taggers in a New York subway. Though the show wasn’t the “massive, playful, and immersive” experience that an Os Gemeos installation can be, “I couldn’t stop smiling the entire time I was in the gallery.”