RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – At first glance, Belgrano Avenue in the Buenos Aires town of Banfield is nothing special. Still, there is a peculiar behavior among its passers-by: they walk with more or less haste, they go in and out of the stores, but all of them, at some point or another, raise their eyes to the sky and smile.
The reason for this spontaneous happiness is two huge hyper-realistic style murals that dialogue with each other. The largest of them, 65 meters high, shows a little girl on her back, standing on her toes to build a wall with ‘lego’ pieces, while the smaller one, 30 meters high, presents another child of a similar age, curiously blowing a toy balloon.
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Both works bear the signature of Martín Ron (Caseros, 1981), the Argentine muralist with the greatest international projection due to the dimensions and extreme detail of his paintings, compositions that, he affirms, have the purpose of “healing as many people” as possible.
“The emotions that I love to transmit are joy, very good energy, which is a surprise, and there is another emotion, which is an awakening, that the works are an inspiration for all those people who have a dormant passion,” he told Efe agency from the rooftop of a building near the mural of the little girl.
A HYPERREALIST STYLE
In his more than twenty years of career, the Argentine artist has painted about 400 murals of all kinds, more or less large, better or worse preserved, although to be considered an “authentic Martin Ron,” a mural requires two main elements: fantasy and “visual impact”.
“It would be a kind of magic realism because I work a lot with hyperrealism on a giant scale, with fantasy elements, but I don’t resolve it in a stylized or dreamlike way. I want this girl behind us to look and impress us as if she were a giant, real girl doing something on the wall,” he explains.
Some thirteen kilometers east of Banfield, in the town of Bernal, is his most recent creation: a nine-story high mural that exhibits, with 3D effects and an allusion to the British artist Bansky, a teenage girl holding a balloon tightly and seeing herself reflected in it.
But Martín Ron has stamped his signature on the walls of Buenos Aires and its surroundings and added color to the corners of Moscow, London, and Doha, among other cities.
“When you do this, people receive it gratefully because you are changing for the better that moment when they can enjoy work. It is a universal language, and with the look, even if you don’t understand the language, you see that connection,” says the muralist.
THE ARTIST’S PROCESS
Since his rise to fame six years ago, Martín Ron has focused more and more on painting large murals, a challenge that does not allow him to work on more than five or six walls per year.
For this reason, the muralist always relies on the help of two other people, Mariana Parra and Nicolás Dicciano. Between the three of them, they manage to finish the works within three to five weeks, depending on weather conditions.
The materials they use most are acrylic paint, latex, hydro enamel, and “a lot of rollers and a lot of brush”, unlike other artists who make indiscriminate use of aerosol, which Martín Ron reserves for some special effects.
“I like the works to last, so I make a good preparation of the wall, I use first quality materials, and I do a good protection afterward”, says the artist.
In fact, that eagerness to “leave a mark” leads the artist from Buenos Aires to think about all his murals with great care and “responsibility”, aware of the transformation they imply for the public spaces that host them.
“I think that when I finish signing it, work comes to life and becomes an entity that makes things happen. I become dissociated, I leave, I continue painting elsewhere, and the works become friends with the people,” he says.
THE NEXT TARGET
The pandemic contributed to lower “a little bit the revolutions” of Martin Ron, prioritizing himself and rethinking his ambitions as an artist, in a year when many projects “fell like a house of cards.”
However, a circumstance did not discourage the muralist and his team, who will soon put their expertise to the test again in the central Corrientes Avenue in Buenos Aires, to paint what will become, at one hundred meters tall, the largest mural in Latin America.