Lionel Messi is honored in Miami with a 20-meter mural

A giant mural of the face of Leo Messi will welcome Miami (Florida) to the Argentine soccer player, who next Sunday will be presented as the new and shining star of the inter miamithe Jorge Mas club and david beckham.

This smiling Messi, more than 20 meters tall, is the work of Ignacio Bagnasco, also an Argentine, and stands in the Wynwood neighborhood, an open-air museum of urban art where Bagnasco is still working on his third mural project with the former player of the Barcelona Fc and the paris saint germain as protagonist.

Bagnasco, who is 41 years old and has previously painted murals of Messi in Argentina and Albania, told EFE this Monday that “hopefully” the world soccer star can visit the place where his work is exhibited, which still has a few days of work to finish.

But he knows that “Messi cannot walk on the street for security reasons”, so it is possible that he only knows his portrait from photographs.

The one who has already contemplated it and even climbed on the crane that Bagnasco uses is David Beckham, the retired English soccer star, who was on Sunday with his wife Victoria in the place and left a record of it on social networks.

Bagnasco says that he is from Buenos Aires and began to paint and draw as a child. In his house “they were not much about football”, but that is the “Argentine passion”, he says, and commissions for murals of footballers have rained down on him for years, including one of the deceased Diego Armando Maradona.

He does not enter into the eternal discussion of whether ‘El Pelusa’ was better than Messi and continues to paint the portrait of Rosario with his aerosols, in which he works from a photograph but without projections, only drawing and using techniques that help to save the proportions.

Bagnasco says that this project is commissioned by the real estate developer of the Wind28 residential complex and that the inclement weather in Miami, which at this time of year is characterized by intense heat and sudden showers, does not scare him.