Artist recycles a theme creating ‘Latin American Mona Lisa’ in El Salvador with plastic bottle caps

Children look at a mural made with plastic bottle caps by Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares on an apartment building in the Zacamil neighbourhood in Mejicanos, El Salvador. Photo / Marvin Recinos, AFP

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 neighbourhood outside the capital of El Salvador instead of the walls of the Louvre.

Using a rainbow of colours and various sizes of caps, Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares’ latest installation is 13m 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 colourful checkerboard sky.

And it wouldn’t be the Mona Lisa without her penetrating gaze and that ever-elusive smile, this time seen on a sun-kissed face rendered with red, orange and yellow caps. Her jewellery, hairstyle and colourful dress evoke a modern Latina’s graces.

Olivares has created murals using plastic caps in Venezuela, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, France and Italy, finding use for over two million caps in more than two dozen murals.

He hopes his work will give viewers “a completely different view of plastic waste”.

-Agence France-Presse