By night, Rio de Janeiro’s Lapa district has a reputation. On Friday and Saturday – after 11pm to be exact – the artisan neighbourhood descends into a denizen of sex, drugs and samba. Yet despite the frequent armed police raids and the odd fist-fight, Lapa’s ornate stairway and the street below it attracts hundreds of motley revellers all keen for a puff of Brazilian party spirit. In fact, so enamoured was hip-hop superstar Snoop Dogg when he sniffed out Lapa on one holiday, that he came back to film scenes of his ‘Beautiful’ music video here.

By day, however, Lapa shows no hint of its moonlighting alter-ego. Instead, it is the kind of community where bored and curious neighbours still peer out of windows at the passing tourists, only to disappear behind curtains once they’ve been spotted. By now, they’re probably also used to seeing their most well-known resident standing outside having his photo taken, and chatting to strange-looking estrangeiros – Portuguese for foreigner.

The resident in question is the artist known as Selaron, whose home is perched mid-way up a flight of the most awe-inspiring public stairs you’ve ever seen. These are ‘Selaron’s stairs,’ as they have come to be known. To find the man behind them, you’ll need to ask the locals. They all point in the same direction – to number 24, a ramshackle building which is the artist’s home.

Emerging from his front door, Selaron is every bit as parched and weathered as the building he lives in, and with good reason. A true eccentric, for the last 14 years he has been engaged in what is possibly the longest-running, most organic decorative art project in the world.

In 1983, after travelling, living and working as a painter and sculptor in over 50 countries around the world, Selaron, who is originally from Chile, decided to settle in Brazil. In 1990, on a whim, he began renovating the dilapidated 125 metre, 215-step stairway which runs past his front door. Neighbours mocked him for his choice of colours. He covered the steps in fragments of blue, green and yellow tiles – the colours of the Brazilian flag.

“It is my tribute to the Brazilian people,” he says in broken English.

Today, the stairway has become one of Rio’s must-see tourist destinations. It has been featured in commercials for Coke, American Express and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Photographers from National Geographic, Wallpaper and even Playboy have all clamoured for a shot of the artist and his work.

Selaron, now 57, is mostly unphased by the attention, as the project has always been more personal than professional. Instead, he is more of a down-home kind of guy. Some nights, you’ll even find him chatting to the young party-goers on the street. He wows them with stories from his life and attracts the kind of reverential, sit-right-up attention not usually afforded to elders by youths more interested in a pash than a painter.

The process of working on the stairway has cost Selaron – quite literally – blood, sweat and tears, not to mention the numerous telephone line disconnections and the occasional threat of eviction due to unpaid rent. Like many artists, Selaron is a man possessed, his stairway a labour of love. Behind the brilliant mosaic of shattered tiles, there is a dark undercurrent to Selaron’s stairs, which he is reluctant to divulge even with the gentlest of journalistic prodding.

On the one hand, there is the Selaron who stands satisfied on his stairs, gazing at his handiwork like a proud father. On the other, there is the man who describes his work as “punishing,” a “prison” which is “never complete.”

No sooner has the stairway been ‘finished,’ than Selaron embarks upon yet another ‘section,’ constantly chopping and changing the tiles. Visitors to the stairs also cannot miss the prolific motif of a pregnant African woman running throughout the tiles, some 300-odd of which have been hand-painted by Selaron and incorporated into his work. It’s a moot point which Selaron prefers not to discuss.

“A personal problem,” is all he will say. “In my past.”

Such is the drive of the artist that he plunges the little money that he earns selling his paintings back into the stairs. Since 1977, he says, to get by he has sold an estimated 25,000 portraits all featuring the same pregnant woman.

When he began working on the stairs, Selaron used any materials he could find – leftovers from construction sites, bits and pieces he found foraging though Rio’s ample urban waste. These days, however, he uses tiles donated to him, and sent to him from over 60 countries across the world.

He scratches his head when I ask to see some from Australia or New Zealand, and explains that he hasn’t received any yet. Although the idea of completing his stairway might seem impossible right now, Selaron is still keen for anyone with the urge to help him get at least part of the way there.