Made of plastic caps in many colors and sizes, Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa has a Latin American version: a 13-meter-tall mural erected in El Salvador by a Venezuelan artist. The mural is on the façade of a building in Zacamil, in the Mejicanos district, a working-class area of San Salvador that was once controlled by feared gangs, whose activity has declined sharply following President Nayib Bukele’s controversial security policy.
The artwork depicts a woman with Latin features, black hair, a colorful dress, earrings, a necklace, and a piercing gaze, shown slightly in profile. “I wanted to portray a Latin American Mona Lisa,” the artist, Venezuelan Óscar Olivares, told AFP. At 29, he has already painted murals in Venezuela, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Italy.
But unlike the Mona Lisa, painted in a restrained style with dark colors, the Latin American version— inspired by the pointillist paintings of French artist Paul Signac— is made from 100,000 recycled plastic bottle caps. “The Mona Lisa is an ordinary woman and an icon of the Italian Renaissance,” Olivares said, and now “we are living a new renaissance, both in El Salvador and around the world.”
The mural took three weeks to complete, although collecting, washing, and sorting the caps brought by neighbors took several months. “This was made by picking the little caps practically out of the trash,” said Angélica Esmeralda, 56, who took part in the collection. Esmeralda added that children were even given “something” if they turned in the bottle caps they found.
The most important thing about the work, Olivares said, is “the impact it has on every viewer and every person who took part,” because they will end up with “a totally different view of plastic waste.” He added that “in the past, gangs used graffiti and urban art to mark territory,” and now art has a different meaning— “and we’re not experiencing it in a museum, we’re experiencing it in a working-class community.”
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