BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
For more than two decades, MrKas has carried his Porto-born graffiti instincts across continents, painting walls from Ireland to Malta, Greece, the Netherlands, the Azores, and beyond. Festivals such as Waterford Walls, Meeting of Styles in Tampere, Kings Spray in Amsterdam, and the Pompeii Street Art Festival have shaped his evolution, each one adding another chapter to his ongoing dialogue between realism, memory, and perception. Yet no matter how far he travels, there is a steady pull that brings him back to Portugal. The return is not nostalgic but purposeful—a way to ground his practice in the places that shaped his earliest sense of community and identity.
What began as youthful graffiti—an impulsive act sparked by a stray spray can on a Porto street—has matured into a visual language built on precision, layered imagery, and portraits that seem to exist between dimensions. Today, he combines the discipline of photorealism with deliberate ruptures: cut-outs, geometric interference, and the feeling that an image is being assembled or disassembled in real time. The tension is central to his work.
His newest mural, Generations, created for the Douro Street Art Festival in the village of Riodades, carries some of those ideas into a deeply local context. Painted on the walls of the town’s school, the work reflects the artist’s engagement with the region’s everyday life. “In Riodades, among the vineyards and mountains of the Douro Valley, I found a story of identity and belonging,” he says.
The mural depicts three figures—“three souls,” in his words—each one connected to a facet of the village’s character: childhood and learning, music and harmony, tradition and joy. In the section showing the musician’s hands playing an instrument, the composition tilts between realism and constructed image, pointing directly to the layered, intergenerational act of keeping culture alive.
This appears as a recognition of the people who define the Douro’s cultural continuity. “This mural is more than paint. It’s a tribute to the people who keep culture alive. Here, the future begins with roots—strong, real, and human,” MrKas tells us.
