I am Rex Bantron, and I dedicate myself to painting and directing urban art in Mexico City. I’ve been doing graffiti for over twenty years.
Since I was a kid (morro), I’ve been curious about the streets, drawing, and Mexican popular culture. My style – totally chilango. My work reflects the chaos, irreverence, and multicolored saturation of my city.
It’s not that I didn’t like school; what I hated was the rigid, structured, and square dynamics of the school system. So I always preferred drawing and having fun creating over studying. I always painted and/or tried to escape into that side of creativity and imagination.
I’ve been through some really heavy (cabronas) phases throughout my artistic career. I started as a rebellious kid doing vandalist graffiti in Azcapotzalco, but I found a crucial refuge in a local sign-painting and silkscreen workshop where I channeled that adolescent madness into technical learning.
I’ve lived through the birth of street art in the 2000s and my own media attention. I also stopped painting graffiti for a long time because of addictions that kept me wandering the streets. Like being a recognized graffiti figure, but without actually painting — just for being in the streets…
Right or wrong… I’ve been recapping all those times and that journey.
I define my growth as a total collage.
I have a form of graphic rebellion: stealing images, raiding the internet, and creating something more, to make a remix of street nostalgia.
I wouldn’t want to lose the inspiration to create, the spark of combining things and arranging them so they look pretty and turn out badass (chingón), man 😅
I consider myself a global artist. I utopically dream of a world without borders — the ones that divide us and limit our space, all that systemic bullsh*t. I’ve always envisioned a very plural plan for everything I do.
Sometimes I struggle to focus on something that belongs only to me, because I usually love being collaborative and organizing things.
But I always have to go back to the chaos of the city, to my f*cking smog, to my own madness, man. Honestly, that’s what makes me feel like I’m working and getting things done.
That will always be my origin and my essence: that I’m a rat from Mexico City. That intensity transfers directly into my paintings, the ones I conceive as a total collage of street essence: a chaotic mix of paint, stencils, sign-painting (rótulos), splatters, and graffiti.
I love my Mexico City. It’s intense, and so is my idea: to create and love intensely.
– Rex Bantron for Dead Relatives.
