I used to think ancient murals were just, you know, old paintings on walls.
Then I spent three days wandering through photographs of Teotihuacan’s compound frescoes—the ones depicting jaguars and feathered serpents and these impossibly intricate processions of priests—and something clicked. The artists working there between roughly 100 and 550 CE weren’t just decorating temples. They were solving design problems that contemporary muralists are still grappling with: how do you make a massive wall feel alive, how do you guide someone’s eye across twenty feet of space, how do you balance repetition with surprise. Turns out the Teotihuacanos had figured out modular composition centuries before we had design software. They’d paint the same motif—say, a stylized bird—dozens of times across a wall, but each one would have subtle variations in color intensity or feather arrangement. It created this rhythm, this visual cadence that modern street artists like Stinkfish or Inti Castro have basically reverse-engineered. You see it in how they’ll repeat a face or symbol across a building facade, tweaking each iteration just enough to keep your brain engaged. The Pre-Columbian painters understood what neuroscientists confirmed way later: pure repetition numbs us, but patterned variation holds attention. I guess it makes sense when you’re trying to communicate with people who might be illiterate or speak different languages—you need redundancy plus novelty.
The Flat Perspective Problem That Wasn’t Actually a Problem
Here’s the thing about Teotihuacan murals that drives art historians slightly crazy: they’re almost aggressively two-dimensional. No Renaissance perspective tricks, no shadowing to suggest depth.
Which contemporary designers now recognize as a feature, not a bug. Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster? That’s basically channeling the same flat, graphic clarity. The Teotihuacan artists would layer symbols on top of each other—a priest figure overlapping a serpent overlapping a glyph—but keep everything in the same visual plane. This creates what design theorists call “democratic space” where no element dominates through illusionistic depth. Every symbol gets equal visual weight, which is why it works so well for political murals or community art projects where multiple narratives need to coexist. I’ve seen this approach in Clarissa Tossin’s installations, where she’ll project Teotihuacan motifs onto modernist architecture, and the flatness somehow makes the ancient and contemporary elements feel like they’re actually in conversation rather than one being a backdrop for the other. Wait—maybe that’s the real inheritance: not the jaguar motifs themselves but the spatial philosophy. The idea that a wall can hold complexity without hierarchy.
Why Teotihuacan Red Is Definately Having a Moment
That specific red pigment—iron oxide mixed with hematite, giving it this earthy, almost rust-like quality—is everywhere in contemporary public art right now.
You’ll spot it in Brazil’s pixação tradition, in Detroit’s Heidelberg Project, in Johannesburg’s township murals. Part of it’s practical: iron oxide is cheap, weather-resistant, and you can source it almost anywhere. But there’s also this cultural weight it carries. The Teotihuacanos used it to paint their entire pyramid exteriors, so the city would’ve glowed red at sunset—imagine that, an entire metropolitan center color-coded for drama. Contemporary muralists working in postindustrial neighborhoods have picked up on how that red can reclaim space, mark territory without aggression. It’s warm but not soft, attention-grabbing but not garish. Honestly, I think there’s something primal about it that transcends specific cultural contexts. Ochre and red pigments show up in the earliest cave paintings, in Aboriginal art, in basically every culture’s foundational visual language. So when Mexican-American artists like Sandra C. Fernández use Teotihuacan-inspired reds in their work, they’re tapping into this incredible depth of human color memory. Though I should mention—the original Teotihuacan murals used other colors too (yellows, greens, blues from minerals and plants), but the red is what survived best archaeologically, which might skew our perception of their actual palette preferences.
Modular Panels Versus the Western Obsession with the Single Heroic Image
Teotihuacan murals were organized in horizontal registers—think comic strip panels, but each one six feet tall.
This serial narrative structure is showing up in contemporary urban art installations, especially in Latin America and among diaspora artists. Instead of one giant face or symbol dominating a building (very European Renaissance, very “great man” theory), you get these sequences. Multiple scenes, multiple moments, asking viewers to move along the wall and piece together meaning. It’s democratic in a different way than the flat perspective thing—it assumes intelligence and engagement from the audience. The Teotihuacan artists would paint processions of figures, each panel showing a slightly different stage of a ritual or mythological event. Contemporary muralists like Saner or Curiot have adopted similar serial formats for storytelling about immigration, labor, displacement. You have to walk fifty feet to get the full narrative, which means the artwork literally requires physical participation. Can’t just Instagram one perfect shot and move on. Though I guess technically you could stitch together a panorama.
The Unfinished Quality That Might Be Completely Intentional
Some Teotihuacan murals have these weird blank spaces or areas where the underdrawing shows through.
Archaeologists debate whether these were incomplete or deliberately left rough—I’m increasingly convinced it’s the latter. Contemporary street art has embraced this aesthetic hard: visible drips, exposed underlayers, areas where you can see the previous wall color or even older graffiti showing through. It creates temporal depth, acknowledges that walls have histories. Artists like Blu or Vhils literally excavate walls, chipping away layers to create images from archaeological strata. That feels spiritually connected to how Teotihuacan painters would sometimes leave earlier mural layers partially visible when they repainted a temple. It’s all about transparency of process, showing the labor and time embedded in the work. Which honestly might just be me projecting contemporary values onto ancient practice—maybe the Teotihuacanos just ran out of pigment that week, who knows. But the visual effect resonates across centuries regardless of original intent, and that’s what matters for living artistic traditions. They take what works and build on it, interpretation layered over interpretation over interpretation.
