On a brick wall at the end of a narrow laneway in Kensington Market, the Mona Lisa holds a banana.
For more than four decades, the black-and-white mural has been a quiet landmark; an artist’s tribute to the spirit of the market and one of the neighbourhood’s longest-standing pieces of street art. But it took until now to fully complete it.
The neighbourhood has long been a landing place for newcomers and a haven for artists, a mix of cultures, storefronts and street life that has helped define its identity for more than a century.
Last week, its artist came back to finish the job.
The idea to restore the mural began last year, when the Kensington Market Community Land Trust (a non-profit that owns and manages residential properties in the neighbourhood) heard about a City of Toronto grant for outdoor art. Since the group owns the building at 54–56 Kensington Ave., where the mural is painted, they contacted the original artist, Peter Matyas, to see if he’d return to complete the work.
The mural itself started with $200, a bottle of rum and a dare.
The dare? To sneak a mural onto a public wall — no permission, no plan, just paint, rum and nerve.
Back in 1982, Matyas and two friends wandered the market at night in search of a wall — flashlight in hand, rum-fuelled and determined to follow through on a challenge.
The organization spent the next year working to coordinate his visit. They never considered anyone else, said Angela Ho, a community planner with the Land Trust.
“Partly because we know how iconic the mural is in the neighbourhood,” she said. “It’s a focal point people come to often.
“It wouldn’t have felt right if we had chosen another artist to paint over that work,” she added, “especially knowing the deep connections that Peter has with the Market.”
Now 74 and living in Bridgewater, N.S., Matyas returned to Toronto this fall to update and restore the piece.
“My heart is in this,” he said. “It’s just overwhelming.”
Wearing a red safety helmet and paint-splattered pants, Matyas spent long days on a race-car red skyjack restoring the three-storey mural. He set aside two weeks for the work, painting eight to 10 hours a day. On a break this week, he reflected on what brought him back — and what hasn’t changed in the neighbourhood.
Born in Toronto to newly immigrated Czechoslovakian parents, Matyas grew up in a home filled with stagecraft and art. His mother worked as a theatre director, while his father built sets, which Peter helped paint. At home, they spoke only Czech.
“When I started school, they sent me home thinking I was deaf,” he said. “But I just didn’t understand English.”
He and a classmate who spoke only Greek learned to communicate by drawing pictures. It was the beginning of a lifelong relationship with visual language.
In the 1970s, after studying at the Toronto School of Art, Matyas found himself drawn to Kensington.
“Searching for a place to settle into,” he said, “Kensington Market blew my mind.”
He lived in a studio above a coffee shop. “The shop ground coffee early in the morning and the smell drifted into my studio,” he said. “I can still hear the market bubbling up. It was just heaven, really.”
He worked as a sign painter, lettering the fronts of fish shops, butchers, and spice stores. “I didn’t have to apply for a job,” he said. “The job was in the streets and with the people, I could walk out the door, dip my brush and make a few dollars.” The mural’s original version was painted at night, with a friend holding a flashlight and Matyas dangling from the roof in a bosun’s chair. Budget constraints limited the design to black and white, but over time, he returned to add more, including avocados, pineapples and sugarcane — ingredients he picked up directly from market vendors.
The mural’s original version was painted at night, with a friend holding a flashlight and Matyas dangling from the roof in a bosun’s chair. Budget constraints limited the design to black and white, but over time, he returned to add more, including avocados, pineapples and sugarcane — ingredients he picked up directly from market vendors.
This time, he added bees, a nod to the invisible labour that supports the food system, and beneath the mural, a new inscription: “This building is community owned.”
The Land Trust bought the building in 2021. “When we bought it, we were able to ensure tenants of the building could remain in their homes,” said Ho. “Some of these people have lived there for 40-plus years.”
For Matyas, the mural has always been about more than paint. As he puts it: “The different nationalities of people, large varieties of foods, and a sense of tolerance for all,” he said. “It’s that spirit that draws me back again and again to Kensington Market.”
