A wagtail is a small gray, black and white bird. When the Brazilian street artist known as L7matrix painted one on a wall in the French town of Moissy-Cramayel in 2019, he left the shape realistic and blew the plumage apart into shards of orange, blue and violet. The piece was titled “La Bergeronnette Colorée”, the colored wagtail, and it was the town’s first urban fresco.
That trick, a lifelike animal that seems to break into flying fragments of color, is the signature of Luis G. Martins, the painter behind the L7matrix name. His birds look as if they are mid-burst, and on a large wall the effect reads like motion frozen on brick.
From a São Paulo childhood to walls on four continents
Martins was born in 1988 in the countryside of São Paulo state, according to his artist page at the UK festival Upfest. He entered art contests as a child and picked up a spray can for the first time at 13, which pushed him toward mixing media. Today his walls combine India ink, varnish, soft and oil pastel, acrylic and spray paint, his production agency Quai 36 says.
The agency describes the formula as highly stylized geometric pieces and color puzzles set against realism built from careful detail. Birds are the best-known theme, but he also paints tigers, ghostly faces that look like colored spirits, and glowing jellyfish. He is based in France these days, and his walls have gone up from Australia and Canada to the US, as well as Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
His own artist statement is blunt about the method. “Everything generates the chaos,” it begins, pointing to the city’s disorder, neglect and human sorrow as the raw material behind the bright surfaces.
Where the walls are
A few of the documented pieces show how far the style has traveled:
- Moissy-Cramayel, France (2019): “La Bergeronnette Colorée”, painted for a street art festival south of Paris, with a bird chosen from the local region.
- Cape Town, South Africa (2020): “Evolution of Birds” and “Evolution of Birds II”, two murals listed by the organizers of the city’s International Public Art Festival.
- Melun, France (2021): a wall at 7 Rue Saint-Liesne produced with Quai 36 for the city.
- Lisbon, Portugal: a bird piece in the Portuguese capital, one of several cities in Iberia where his work appears.
Why the birds seem to move
The sense of motion in an L7matrix wall comes from a simple contrast. The head, eye and beak are painted with photographic care, so the brain locks onto a real animal. The body and wings then break into hard-edged triangles that fan outward, the way a camera blurs a fast wing. Because the fragments are flat color while the face is modeled with light and shadow, the eye reads the flat shards as speed rather than as part of the bird. Seen from the street, a still wall starts to look like a flock caught at the instant of takeoff.
The same approach scales down to canvas. Upfest’s online gallery lists an original L7matrix work, “Cnidarians.1”, at £4,500, about $5,700, with a print of the same image at £320. The title points to the jellyfish series, where the same glowing fragments stand in for bioluminescence.
Murals tend to outlive their festivals, and Badiyaa has followed the way painted walls change the value of the places around them, from a student-era Keith Haring mural inside a $25 million Tribeca loft to the concrete folk art statues of Grandview in Wisconsin. More stories like this sit in our Offbeat section.
For anyone hoping to see one in person, the Melun wall at 7 Rue Saint-Liesne is about 45 minutes by train from central Paris.
Image: Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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