Muto

Often an old story makes a splash when it’s told in a new way, given new context, or played out on a larger scale. Muto does all of these. Here, the familiar morph animation takes on a new face where characters animate across the real-life streets and buildings of Buenos Aires.

Blu, a street artist based in Buenos Aires, isn’t new to animation. In past work he’s explored animating across the white walls of unfinished rooms—characters morphing as they move from surface to surface. Muto takes his pioneering style a step further by bringing his characters to life in the public streets. Painted in large scale across the public walls and buildings of Buenos Aires and Baden over this past summer (Argentinian winter), Muto is a mad mash-up of man and machine where the body’s mechanics are distorted and deformed across graffitied brick walls and sidewalks.

In true street art fashion, Blu allows the limitations and obstacles of the environment to shape the action. He looks at his canvas not as a large blank sheet, but as a complex 3-dimensional surface—a setting. The weather and lighting shift with the day, pedestrians make split-second cameos, cars blur by unknowing—all unchoreographed occurances of the natural environment. Muto takes the true spirit of street art and brings it to life.

Blu is no newcomer to large-scale public work. His art is finding a larger audience, and you can now find his mutilated bodies on such respected establishments as the Tate Modern Museum of Art in London.