SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – Call it a Renaissance in recycling. A massive mural made of plastic bottle caps depicts Latin America’s version of the famed Mona Lisa, adorning a modest apartment building in a working class neighborhood outside the capital of El Salvador instead of the walls of the Louvre.
Using a rainbow of colors and various sizes of caps, Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares’s latest installation is 13m (about 43 feet) tall and takes inspiration from Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci, as well as the pointillist paintings of French artist Paul Signac.
“I wanted to portray a Latin American Mona Lisa,” Olivares told AFP.
The mural is in Zacamil, in the Mejicanos suburb of San Salvador – an area that was once controlled by violent gangs, whose activity has been curbed by President Nayib Bukele’s controversial security crackdown.
“The Mona Lisa is an ordinary woman, and she’s an icon of the Italian Renaissance” and
now “we are living through a new Renaissance, both in El Salvador and the world,” Olivares said.
Completed in three weeks, the composition is made of more than 100 000 recycled bottle caps, after they were gathered by local residents over several months, washed and sorted. Instead of the muted palette of the Italian countryside, Olivares replaced da Vinci’s pastoral background with bright depictions of homes, a bold blue mountain and a colorful checkerboard sky.
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