El Decertor’s Colorful Murals Merge Surrealism and Peruvian Folk Art

The gigantic murals of the Peruvian painter El Decertor run along sidewalks in Lima, on apartment buildings in Baltimore, and on streets and buildings in Venezuela, Morocco, and Mexico, just to name a few. Across each city, the work features consistent motifs of complex, colorful backgrounds made from fractured polygon patterns, with a prominent figure at the mural’s focus. These figures are mostly mystical — they are clearly human, painted with an empathetic realism, but posed with some symbolic gesture or object: metaphors for immigration, agriculture, housing, meditation, colonialism. Occasionally the murals drift into the surrealistic, framing an alternate reality for passersby throughout the city to gaze into, and perhaps recognize some of their own inside.

by Amelia Taylor-Hochberg/High Fructose