Kevin Ledo: the portrait, the gold leaf and a nine-storey Leonard Cohen
Published June 8, 2026 · Updated July 30, 2026
Most people in Montréal have seen a Kevin Ledo without knowing the name. His Leonard Cohen looks down on Saint-Laurent boulevard at the corner of Napoléon, nine storeys of a face that the city adopted immediately.
This monograph examines a practice built almost entirely on the human face, from Montréal walls to projects in Jordan, Lebanon and the United States.
A practice built on the face
Kevin Ledo began his artistic practice in 2005 and has since built an unusually consistent body of work: the human face, treated almost as a genre in itself. His biography notes that he grew up in a mix of urban and ethnic cultures, raised by Portuguese parents from the Azores, and that background shows in a portraiture that treats ordinary people with the seriousness usually reserved for icons.
Formally, his signature is a tension. The face is rendered with a realism that holds at any distance, then interlaced with stylised abstract forms and set in a minimal, slightly surreal space with no foreground. The portrait floats. What that does to a viewer is subtle: it removes context, so the only thing left to read is the person.
The Leonard Cohen mural
In 2017, the year after the singer's death, Ledo painted Leonard Cohen on the side wall of a building on Saint-Laurent boulevard, at the corner of Napoléon, nine storeys high. The work became a landmark almost immediately, and it is now one of the images the city uses to describe itself, listed by Tourisme Montréal among the murals worth walking to.
Painting a portrait at that scale is an engineering problem as much as an artistic one. The proportions have to be calculated for a viewer standing at street level, looking up at a steep angle, which distorts everything. A face that is correct on a sketch reads as wrong on the wall unless the artist has anticipated the foreshortening. That the Cohen portrait feels natural from the sidewalk is the whole measure of the craft.
Why gold leaf
Ledo works with spray paint and latex, and occasionally with gold leaf. That last material is not a decorative flourish: gold leaf carries fifteen centuries of religious painting behind it, from Byzantine icons to medieval altarpieces, where it marked the sacred and reflected the light of candles.
Applying it to a contemporary portrait transfers that charge onto a living face. It is a considered gesture, and it explains why his work often reads as devotional without ever being religious. On a wall, the material also does something no paint can: it changes with the hour, so the piece is not the same at noon and at dusk.
Montréal, Zarqa, Beirut
Ledo has painted at MURAL in Montréal, where he is among the artists invited for the 2026 edition, and in international programmes including AptART in Zarqa and Beirut and the One Blue Sky project in the United States. AptART works with children affected by conflict and displacement, which puts a portrait practice in a very different setting: painting a face there is a statement about who deserves to be seen.
That international record matters to Montréal in a concrete way: it is one of the reasons the city is now cited as a mural destination. A festival is only as strong as the artists it can convince to come back, and Ledo is one of the local names that anchor it.
Seeing and collecting Kevin Ledo
The Cohen mural is the obvious place to start, on Saint-Laurent at Napoléon, best seen from the opposite sidewalk in late afternoon light. Art Public Montréal catalogues his work in the city and is the reliable reference for locating other pieces.
Studio work by an artist of this profile circulates in small numbers, so availability changes quickly. If nothing is listed at the moment, our advisors can tell you what is expected, and can point you to Montréal portraitists working in a comparable register.
