All posts tagged: MrKas

A bus station is designed for leaving, but memory has a habit of staying behind.

Porto-born MrKas has been bending realism for more than two decades, carrying his early graffiti instincts into an increasingly polished language of portraiture, fractured planes, optical shifts, and architectural intervention. Faces can appear to break apart or to reassemble; walls become windows, openings, interruptions, and then walls. The technique can be exacting, but some of the stronger works by MrKas are not really about technique at all—they are about the human story that gives the illusion somewhere genuine to land.

For his newest mural, A Despedida como Ponto de Partida (Farewell as a Starting Point), that story is his own.

The setting is Garagem Atlântico, a cavernous former bus terminal in Porto that once dispatched travelers across Portugal. Plans are for it to begin another life as a cultural center. MrKas remembers coming here as a child to catch some of those buses, one among the thousands of passengers who accumulated decades of arrivals, embraces, impatient waiting, missed connections, and difficult, wistful goodbyes beneath its roof.

He returns now with a woman at a window, her hand raised to bid you a good trip. It is a simple gesture, enlarged and suspended inside a building practically constructed around the idea of departure. Yet here the goodbye points in two directions.

“The past bids farewell, while the present makes room for new stories to emerge,” says MrKas, who describes his new mural as a way of connecting the history of the terminal with whatever comes next.

There is something fitting about putting this image here while the Garagem itself is in transition. The buses are gone. Soon galleries, music, food, and cultural activity will occupy spaces that were organized around timetables and destinations. For decades you came here to go somewhere else. Perhaps now there will be new reasons to stay.

You would like to think that we all have a basic set of priorities, although it’s not readily apparent. Street artist and muralist Mr. Kas boldly posits that we need to remember that it’s “Humanity First”.

His personal tribute to firefighters, he painted this photorealist piece in Vila nova de Gaia, Portugal.

With his own particular brand of magic realism and optic art that is sometimes referred to as anamorphic, MrKas has a command of the fact-based world that enables him to fool viewers into seeing something else when they are standing in the right place.

A regular participant in Street Art festivals with commercial sensibility and the wide-eyed wonder of newly discovered adventure, MrKAS has a sense of humor as well, and he’s ready to play – at least with your perceptions.

Born in Porto and now living in Brussels, the aerosol painter has travelled to countries like China, Malaysia, UAE, Indonesia, Italy, Greece, Malta, France, the Netherlands with realism that goes askew.

Here back in his Portuguese hometown, MrKas is spraying in multiple directions, playing with your perceptions some more in an abandoned factory.