His mother calls him Mateo but most of the world knows the mysterious street artist whose extraordinary work you see here as MTO. French born but Berlin based, MTO’s work is characterized by incredibly detailed renditions of über cool actors and musicians with a dash of red as his signature or around his work as a signifier of its boundaries
Although his work is often extremely large – up to two meters high and wide (and often much, much larger) it usually only takes him around five hours to create one of his smaller works. The larger ones can take up to a week but even that amount of time seems small when the results are viewed. One can only then imagine the mental preparation that goes in to this meticulous work.
[vimeo clip_id=”49240251″ width=”680″ height=””]
MTO recently returned to his native France where he completed the large piece above. Fortunately someone was around with a film camera to capture the process – and this really gives you an idea of the work that goes in to a single piece of work. This is labor intensity both in terms of the work put in and the creative process involved.