Macae, Brazil 2011

This mural in Macae, Brazil, shows Speedy Graphito, born in 1961, at his most playful and culturally engaged. The way the image has been built from these thick black lines and blocks of colour is really striking. There's a kind of visual puzzle going on, with faces and hands emerging from this whirlwind of lines and symbols. Imagine the artist up there, wrestling with the scale of the wall, making it work! The piece seems to borrow from Pop Art with its bold colors and comic-like imagery, but there's also something very contemporary about its mix-and-match approach. The more you look, the more you sense an artist who’s deeply in conversation with the world around him. I bet he was listening to great music while painting it. Speedy Graphito seems to be saying that art is for everyone, everywhere. And that's something I can definitely get behind.