About the Mural

This mural by Belin spans two corner walls at 1701 3rd Avenue South, across from Tropicana Field and next to a large mural by Pixel Pancho. The left wall is only a few yards away from the elevated lanes of I-275 North, and almost level with it. Passing cars see it from the freeway.

Both walls are 36 feet high. The wall facing south is 105 feet long. The wall facing west is 75 feet long. The mural covers both walls, but is blocked in parts by utility poles and wires, and a giant support for a billboard.

The background of the mural is white. The image, centered to wrap across the inside corner where the walls meet, is an abstract cubist face with a photorealistic face peering through.

On the left is a fragmented face as tall as the wall, with a beige-grey neck and forehead, shaped like an upside-down vase. A bright yellow cheek with blue vertical stripes cuts across the left side of the face like a tall, rounded sail. It partly covers a realistic, glistening pair of lips, like a cut-out from a black and white photograph. Just to the left of the blue-striped yellow cheek, a realistic ear pokes out.

Amid this fragmented abstraction, a huge and photorealistic eye gazes out of a wide triangle with an orange tip. The eye is huge, in black and white, in close-up, open wide and slightly bloodshot, with a heavy lid. A fragment of a too-small realistic nose is to the right, along the seam where the two walls meet at a 90 degree angle. The orange tip of the triangle the eye and the nose are in, stretches across the corner.

Above the eye, a plain beige forehead. An angular shock of abstract red hair shoots off to the upper left.

On the right section of the mural, a giant cartoon eye of gold spreads across the wall, with stiff grey lines spaced out as lashes and a huge black pupil.

An arc of orange cuts across the upper left section of the pupil, cradling another black and white, photorealistic eye, and an ear. This eye is serious, heavy-lidded, looking toward the left.

Taking this cubist picture as a whole, angled on two corner walls, it’s a gigantic face broken into sections – half of it real and half like a giant cartoon. With a long grey dotted line painted across it, from the middle of the left wall, rising up across the right-hand wall.

The realistic features were created from a photo of Belin’s own face. The image is serious, behind the playful cubist face.

Behind and to the right of the gold cartoon eye on the west-facing wall, a fat, fragmented arrow outlined in gold, angles in from the top and straightens out, pointing south.

To the left of the face, toward the top of the wall, is a letter B so squared-off and abstracted you can barely recognise it, a huge orange lower-case letter E with the top of the E painted solid, and a large, angled letter L with the vertical part of the L painted much wider than normal.

Miguel Ángel Belinchón Bujes, known as Belin, is a Spanish artist with a style he calls Postneocubism.

As a self-taught painter, Belin blends realism with cubism to create a uniquely modern technique reminiscent of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.

His paintings and sculptures are found on walls and galleries around the world and his designs are used by Dockers, Sephora and Los Angeles’ High Voltage Tattoo.