Mateo Fernández

The street is my first gallery, and it taught me everything the studio later refined. I started painting legal walls in Stuttgart as a teenager, with no formal training, learning composition and colour by trial and error in front of anyone who happened to walk by. That public, unguarded way of working still shapes how I paint on canvas: fast, confident lines, bold colour blocks, and a willingness to let mistakes stay visible rather than painting over them. Moving between outdoor walls and gallery-scale canvases keeps both practices honest. The street reminds me that art has to hold attention without an artist statement standing next to it, and the studio gives me room to slow down and push a single image further than a wall ever allows. I want the two contexts to keep talking to each other rather than treating one as more serious than the other.