Blurring the lines between reality and illusion in street art is Peeta’s specialty. You could stand right in front of one of his creations, gazing up at its proportions with your own eyes, and still barely be able to tell which elements are three-dimensional and which aren’t. His latest works are just as incredible as ever, transforming the facades of buildings in Mannheim, Germany; Padua, Italy; Costa Smeralda, Sardinia; Lisbon, Portugal and more.

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Typically designed to meld with a vivid blue sky, his creations are best viewed on a bright and sunny day, though some can be found in shady niches as well. His mastery of light and shadow creates voids and projections where there are none. His ability to craft convincing abstract shapes is likely aided by the fact that he’s a sculptor, too, shaping and painting aluminum.

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Last time we caught up with Peeta (aka Manuel Di Rita), who’s based in Venice, Italy, he was fresh off a spate of multi-story murals that showcased a tremendous growth on his talents. Throughout 2019, he’s been hard at work, his newest project a composition of pale blue and gray on a private residential building created as part of the Stadt.Wand.Kunst mural project.

“The wait is finally over. Under the blue sky and with temperatures that you would rather sit in the shade, movement has come in the past few days in STADT.WAND.KUNST 2019 – in the truest sense of the word. The Venetian artist Manuel Di Rita, aka PEETA , braved the heat and transformed the facade of a private house in the Zehntstr. 1 to a masterpiece. The picture – which should rather be called an oversized sculpture because of its three-dimensionality – is the start of a new, colorful season of large-format murals in the Mannheim urban area.”

“I loved this building since the beginning and I tried my best to combine multidisciplinary skills to transform it while keeping its original taste,” says Peeta on Instagram. “Thanks to the city of Mannheim and the great people that supported and worked on this project.”

Check out more on Instagram @peeta_ead.

Minimalism is chic and trendy, but sometimes, there’s nothing more satisfying than blotting out bland and boring surfaces with bold splashes of color and pattern. That’s especially true when the structure in question is an eyesore, abandoned or weighed down by the baggage of a difficult past. Giving architecture a maximalist makeover with colorful paint can utterly transform not just the buildings themselves but their entire communities, creating a ripple effect of cheerfulness. These vivid modifications are carried out for all sorts of reasons: easing the impact of blight, celebrating a change in the city’s fortune, preserving cultural traditions or simply for the love of art.

Reviving Abandoned Structures

Madrid-based artist Okuda San Miguel has quickly developed one of the most instantly recognizable styles in street art history with his massive paint projects and sculptures. His murals scale skyscrapers, his interiors have transformed church interiors into incredible skate parks and his faceted three-dimensional creations have played starring roles in major festivals, but of all his dazzling projects, his transformations of abandoned buildings make the biggest visual impact. They include turning a sad, deteriorating house in Arkansas into a “universal chapel,” giving an old abandoned church in Morocco a vivid yellow makeover covered in his signature animal faces and painting two enormous skulls onto an abandoned castle in Loire Valley, France for the LaBel Valette Festival.

Atlanta-based artist and muralist Alex Brewer, better known as HENSE, is often commissioned to apply his pleasingly chaotic and colorful style on abandoned and neglected structures all over the world. One of his best-known projects adds a watercolor effect to an old church in a downtrodden neighborhood in Washington DC with the aim of calling attention to the area’s potential as the city’s next bustling arts district. Another massive mural coats the exterior of a warehouse in Richmond, Virginia for the RVA Festival, and a third splashes across a historic building with a boarded-up facade in Atlanta.

Created for Philadelphia mural project “We the People,” which envisions each of its six murals as “a seed of hope for a bright future,” NTEL’s NATIV NTELIGENCE wraps around an entire block of currently empty buildings to provide a reminder of the “nourishing potential of the space.”

Tel Aviv’s derelict and abandoned Dolphinarium building, which was the scene of a 2001 suicide building, got a wild new look in 2015 courtesy of street artist Dede. The shape of the building was just too perfect to pass on turning it into a gigantic set of wind-up choppers.

Brightening Places of Poverty, Monotony & Blight

Poor communities simply don’t have the resources to maintain an outward appearance that the rest of the world finds “acceptable.” When you’re struggling to get by, fresh paint jobs, nice landscaping and even simple building maintenance is often a lower priority by default. But, with the permission and participation of the people living in those communities, projects that aim to revitalize them with a bit of color and care can make a big difference in general morale. The purpose isn’t necessarily to make these neighborhoods more palatable to wealthier people, but to show that they, too, are worthy of beauty and art. While projects like this can run the risk of glossing over deep systemic inequality, they’re beautiful when handled with sensitivity and awareness.

These large-scale mural projects can dramatically alter the mood of a neighborhood while bringing its inhabitants together to take an active role. Examples include German Crew’s transformation of Las Palmitas, Mexico, covering 224,280 square feet of architecture with neon colors, and a series of awesome painting projects by Haas & Hahn throughout Brazil’s favelas.

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In Indonesia, teacher Kampung Pelangi used $22,000 worth of paint to infuse the village of Semarang (which was a slum not so long ago) into a vibrant tourist destination (though it’s not clear whether the town’s poor residents were displaced.)

And in Mumbai, waterfront slums that are home to millions of people have grown far more colorful thanks to the efforts of art teacher Rouble Nagi.

In 2016, Haas & Hahn brought their “FavelaPainting” project back to their home city of Amsterdam to call attention to the need for safe and livable refugee housing. Currently, many refugees are housed in former prisons and other buildings “that have long been an eyesore in Amsterdam’s skyline.”

“The project aims at transforming the buildings, both in- and outside, in order to create their new identity as a new home to the refugees. It will offer opportunities in form of skill training, network building and job opportunity, while empowering the participants to ‘make the place their own.’”

But sometimes it’s little more than monotonous surroundings and a lack of color that prompt colorful architectural makeovers. The isolated and incredibly cold Siberian town of Ust-Yansk combats the potentially depression-inducing wash of gray and white winters with bright colors on the buildings’ roofs after a recent restoration project.

Tirana, the capital city of Albania, wasn’t in a great place before artist-turned-mayor Ed Rama took office. Low on funds, high on crime and suffering from a plague of corruption, the city was also visually bleak. Rama decided to paint one of the saddest-looking buildings a bright orange, and the community loved it. Once he had painted a few more structures in a similar way, a larger movement took off, with international artists turning entire city blocks into works of contemporary art.

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Maximalist Makeovers Transforming Architecture With Vivid Paint Jobs

Life-sized street art interventions play out scenes from a parallel universe on public surfaces all around us in the interactive works of French artist Levalet. Raised in Guadeloupe, France, the artist (also known as art teacher Charles Leval) saw the graffiti that surrounded him as part of the city’s identity, prompting him to look at the streets in a whole new way. What if everyday objects and scenes had an entirely different purpose than the ones we see for them?

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Details of the city that might otherwise be unnoticed by its inhabitants – like dangling cables, clumps of ivy and water spouts – become the genesis of strange, creative and absurd scenes, like glimpses of a world just barely out of reach. While much of Levalet’s work is wheat pasted right onto urban surfaces, he sometimes creates cut-outs that can be layered on top of the fabric of the city, giving it a whole new dimension.

“The street is a place where I can work freely, I don’t have financial or time pressures,” said Levalet in a 2015 interview with Street Art Paris. “And this is mostly about besieging public places, everyday places, and being able to put up work that creates a dialogue with the real world. I like the idea of trying to combine several realities, using the world as a medium, and as a guide for representation, positioning the artistic image, in a place that was not meant for it in the first place.”

“Topography is very important for me, this is why I always check a place before I work on it. I try to mix the world of representation with the real world by playing on the physical cohesion of the situations I put up. Architecture supports my work. Then I work on staging the artwork with photographs. Photography allows me to play with the point of view and to intensify the ‘window-dressing’ dimension of my work. Photography also allows me to create a dramatization within the dramatization by including passers-by or other elements.”

Classical meets modern in a surreal mashup splashed all over the walls of the Thomas cafe in the Netherlands, the work of a duo of artists known as Studio Giftig. Highly in demand for their colorful, oversized works of art, Niels van Swaemen and Káspar van Leek were invited to transform the kind of space most muralists only dream of working in, wrapping their imagery around baroque molding and up onto the ceiling.

Entitled “A Surreal Perception,” the monumental piece pairs black and white portraits of stone statues with floating whales, neon sunglasses, crowned monkeys riding cranes and more, all set on a pale pink backdrop. Much of the work was completed using spray cans, which helped them get into the nooks and crannies of the molding.

The result is a bar, restaurant and event space that’s truly unforgettable. You can check out more images of these vivid interiors at the Thomas’ Facebook page, and follow Studio Giftig’s latest works on Instagram.

Most graffiti artists never get the chance to paint a human figure measuring a staggering 100,000 square feet, but most of them aren’t working directly on massive mountainsides, either. Swiss artist Guillame Legros, better known as Saype, creates temporary scenes in the grass using a special biodegradable paint he developed himself after a year of experimentation. A paint gun helps him spay large quantities of pigment at a time onto grass cut extra short to make each work last as long as it can.

The rate of grass growth and the weather determine whether each ‘fresco,’ as Sayre calls them, lasts just a couple weeks or perhaps just over a month. The 2016 piece ‘Un Grand Homme,’ depicting a man in lederhosen lounging on an Alpine cliff in Leysin, Switzerland, broke world records for its size, while the 2018 piece ‘Present by Future’ created for the Eurockéennes Festival in Belfort, France is his most complex work yet.

“Fascinated by the philosophy and the questions which we could call ‘existential,’ his painting explores, most of the time, problems around the human being,” reads his bio. “His work is for him a way to share his vision of the world and invites us to wonder about our deep nature, our spirit, our place on earth and in the society.”