Pastel

Francisco Díaz Scotto, who signs as Pastel, was born in 1986 in Buenos Aires. An architect by training, a graduate of the Argentine capital's university, he pursues studio painting on canvas and murals on the scale of entire buildings side by side.

Both practices rest on the same subject: plants. Not ornamental ones, but those that grow in the cracks of pavements, against façades, around his studio. He paints them at outsized scale, often as a single stem crossing a gable end from ground to roof, in the soft tones that gave the artist his name. These stubborn weeds work as social symbols in his hands: they say who occupies a place, and how.

He describes his street work as urban acupuncture, a single precise intervention acting on something much larger. That is where his architectural past meets his painting, each wall being chosen for its position in the city as much as for its surface. His murals can be seen across Latin America, Europe, North Africa and the United States.