Mural by Mateo

This work brings together a street-art vocabulary and a urban approach. Its value does not come from applying decoration to architecture: the mural gains meaning through its scale, its surface and the way it is encountered in a real place.

Active since 2010 · Neighborhood: Rosemont Mateo is a weaver of cultures. In his murals, Latin American artisanal patterns, calligraphic ornaments, and the colors of the Arab world blend with Montreal’s asphalt to tell a story of migration, connection, and shared beauty. His works in Rosemont are love letters to diversity, rooted in a neighborhood that experiences it every day. "I use the street as a space to bring color and emotion to everyday life. My work explores the fusion of ornamental traditions rooted in craftsmanship with contemporary urban language. I seek to reflect the richness and coexistence of cultures within the city." A trip to Buenos Aires in 2012 marked the pivotal turning point in Mateo’s practice. Having gone there to learn stenciling from the Argentine artists who invented and codified the technique within the global street art scene, he returned to Montreal with an enriched visual vocabulary and renewed ambition. Stenciling became one of his signature tools, allowing for the kind of ornamental precision that echoes the artisanal traditions he aims to honor. His mural *MAS*—spanning five stories of a building at the corner of Papineau and Rosemont—quickly established itself as one of the neighborhood’s most imposing and photographed public artworks. It serves as a visual landmark that perfectly illustrates his ability to work on a grand scale without sacrificing attention to detail. Yet, Mateo’s work extends far beyond Montreal. His carpet-based artworks, exhibited in a museum in Sharjah (United Arab Emirates), demonstrate his ability to translate his artistic language into unexpected mediums. His project on the rooftop of a major cultural center in Dakar, Senegal—a painted dance floor designed to be viewed from the sky just as much as experienced on the ground—exemplifies a practice unafraid of constraints or novel contexts. Each journey fuels the next in a spiraling exchange of intersecting cultural references.

Mateo, whose practice is connected with Montreal, develops a visual world that can be followed from one wall to another. Captions and archives connected to this body of work document several mural interventions. These points of reference place the image within a practice rather than treating it as an isolated visual.