JOMAD & ANDREW is the collaborative practice of French-Caribbean artist JOMAD and Filipino-American artist ANDREW AGUTOS. Their murals are crafted with the intimacy of a family photo album, using public space as an arena for conversation between older generations and their own. Each mural becomes a monument, a testament to communal life—intermingling of cultures, local landscapes and neighborhood rituals—brought up to date.

The artists arrive at their compositions through a mix of archive photo research, traveling and face-to-face dialogue with residents of the communities they are painting in. Their scenes are composed in a collage-like method, then translated directly on the wall with brushes, allowing for moments of imperfection. Parts of the painting may be left unfinished or blurry, revealing the initial gesture and reading towards abstraction—mirroring the way memories are thought about and perceived collectively. Throughout the process, the painters alternate their distances of looking at the work. Up-close, they engage with their subjects on an intimate painterly level, while from afar, the distortion in scale and impact might suggest a kind of ancestral communication.

These conversations recall photographed keepsakes memorializing their fashionable teenage aunts sightseeing in the ‘70s, celebrating Easter with a plate of crab at the beach between cousins and the wake for a deceased uncle in a cemetery lit by candles. For the artist-duo today, their photo entries depict everyday mobility in French Guiana, the spirit of Caribbean carnival in Guadeloupe, celebrations of women or a typical day in Paris. Their work functions to rekindle these emotions of surprise, joy, humor and clarity.

Each exchange in language and geography are recorded as painted time capsules, where the main threads of family values last, while also continuing to evolve over time: celebration, tradition, beliefs. Walls and public surfaces revitalize these defining moments and complement their foundational preservation.   

Their collaboration draws on their well-developed individual practices: JOMAD focuses on the movement of the body, compositional balance, dreamlike floral landscapes and the colors of Martinique that blossom through the human condition, while ANDREW AGUTOS draws on poetic introspection, an expressionist sensibility and references to fashion, music and metropolitan culture. Their combined approach fuses graffiti and fine art, figuration and abstraction, producing visually rich compositions that convey multiple planes, perspectives and movements to create sensational experiences.