Astro: funk, style and monsters in Montréal graffiti
Published July 30, 2026
Thirty years on the walls have made Astro one of the character painters the Montréal scene calls when letters alone are not enough. His creatures inhabit the city, from a garage in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce to a legal tunnel in Rouen.
This monograph follows a practice that began in the mid-1990s, documented by Art Public Montréal and Wall2Wall Montréal, and looks at what happens when that vocabulary moves onto canvas.
Mid-1990s: a city that was not yet looking
When Astro started painting, Montréal had no mural festival, no public art programme for graffiti and no gallery interested in the discipline. Writers painted for each other, along the railway lines and in the back lanes, and the only archive was photographic and private. Starting in that period means having learned the craft without an audience, which is the surest way to develop a style rather than a brand.
Art Public Montréal, the City's public art portal, sums up the result in a sentence worth quoting: everything is a question of funk, style and monsters. Three influences converge in that vocabulary, old-school New York graffiti for the letters, European cartoons for the line, Japanese animation for the creatures. It is a synthesis rather than an imitation, and it is legible from a distance, which on a wall is the whole point.
« Be creative , be real , be yourself. »
The character painter
Graffiti has an internal division of labour that outsiders rarely notice. On a collaborative wall, some writers handle the letters and others handle the characters, and the two require different skills. Astro belongs to the second category, and Wall2Wall Montréal notes that he regularly brings the character elements to pieces where other artists take care of the typography. That role explains why his name recurs across walls signed by several crews.
His creatures are not decorative. They have expressions, postures and a comic timing that comes from cartoon culture, and they carry the emotional charge of a wall that would otherwise be a pure exercise in lettering. That is also what makes the work translate to canvas: a character holds a composition on its own, where a letter piece often depends on the architecture around it.
DUC, EB and the geography of a scene
Astro paints with the DUC crew, alongside writers such as Pask, Koal, Sino and Stare, and with EB, a French crew that also counts a Montréal member. That double affiliation matters: graffiti crews are how the discipline circulates internationally, well before institutions get involved. It is the reason his work appears both in Rosemont, the Plateau and Hochelaga, and in the legal graffiti tunnel in Rouen, France.
The clearest illustration of that collective culture is the tribute walls to Scaner, a Montréal writer regarded as a king of the local scene, who died in September 2017. Astro contributed to several of them. In graffiti, a tribute wall is the equivalent of a public funeral oration: it names a lineage, and it says out loud who counted.
Commissioned walls and public art
Astro's work also exists in its authorised form. He took part in A'shop's Hip Hop You Don't Stop project on the walls of a garage in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a project that helped establish large-format mural painting in Montréal, and his pieces are catalogued by Art Public Montréal, which lists works under his name. He has painted at MURAL, at Meeting of Styles and at the Canettes de Ruelle editions that bring writers back into the back lanes where the practice began.
The move from illegal to commissioned work is often described as a betrayal by outsiders and as a normal career stage by writers themselves. What matters is whether the vocabulary survives the transition. In Astro's case it does, because the creatures were never dependent on transgression for their effect.
Collecting Astro
A canvas by Astro brings home an artist whose public work can be seen a few streets away, which is exactly what makes street art worth collecting: the piece on your wall belongs to a body of work the city already knows. His formats suit both a domestic room and an office where a single strong image has to carry a whole space.
For a wall, Astro can also be commissioned directly. Interior or exterior, a mural is scoped on surface, access, support and time on site before any price is discussed.
