Cristian (“Cris”) Daniel Camargo is a 32-year-old Argentinian artist whose vocation is to bring hope through the murals he paints in and with communities. He has painted 249 murals in the Americas, two in Europe and has now begun painting in Africa.
Cris defines himself as an ‘itinerant missionary’ and since October 2021 he has been travelling around the world painting collective murals with communities that invite him to do so. Cris is constantly on the move, painting murals that bring hope to the communities he engages with, like the ‘pilgrim of hope’ that Pope Francis invites us to be during this year of Jubilee.
He was born in Mar del Plata, in the south of Argentina. He was taught Franciscan spirituality at home from a very young age because his parents, Raúl and Alicia, belonged to the Franciscan Youth (FraYou). From the age of 14, his faith was strengthened thanks to the parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe and San Juan Diego in the Margaritas district of his city. At the age of 15, the testimony of a lay missionary, Verónica Rubí, from Mozambique, made a great impression on him and he felt the desire to become a missionary. At the time, he did not know how to combine his missionary vocation with his passion for drawing.
He graduated in Fine Arts with a degree in Drawing from the Faculty of Fine Arts in La Plata, a city near Buenos Aires. In 2011, he started “earning a living” by having his drawings printed by various Argentine publishers. In 2018, the “missionary temptation” that Verónica Rubí had awakened in him, the call of Pope Francis to be a ‘Church on the move’, and the social experience he had witnessed in his grassroots community began to demand something more from him.
Cris wanted to use his art to change reality by travelling around the world. He contacted the Chilean musician and Jesuit Cristóbal Fones, who had started a travelling mission in the Americas, and asked him for advice. Father Fones put him off a little by telling him that he first had to learn how to organise a group to paint together. He suggested that he put himself at the service of the communities, answering their call wherever he was needed.
Cris took the advice and began travelling around Argentina. In 2019 he painted 29 murals in different places and communities around the country, and by 2020 he had painted five more, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a worldwide shutdown. He had to adapt his work to go virtual. It was at an online meeting of the Laudato Si’ movement that he met the Colombian Consolata missionary Jonathan Acuña, who invited him to Colombia. In October 2021, Cris left Argentina for the first time to paint abroad.
Despite the differences between countries and realities, Cris always works with communities. “It is not about creating new communities, but about working with the existing ones and strengthening their cohesion and unity. In the communities there are usually different groups, but there is only one mural group and this forces everyone to agree on the design.”
He continues: “When I arrive in a community I ask ‘what are we going to paint?’ and I present a series of dynamics about their own reality, so that they remember their history and imagine together another possible world that can be built in a more peaceful way, a better world, and how to reflect it visually. My idea is that the murals should reflect the possible hope that is in their concrete reality, which amazes them.”
For Cris, “the mural is just an excuse” because the most important thing is the dynamic that leads to its conception and the realisation of what has been conceived together. Cris makes a first sketch that everyone corrects together, even after they have started painting the mural.
Painting together strengthens the bonds between people and creates a special atmosphere of dialogue that Cris has experienced many times, “People open up, free themselves and say things that are inside them,” and the mural remains “as a reference point for the community to remember what they have been able to do together.”
They use brushes and acrylic paint, which makes it easier for everyone to paint. “Even those who initially admit: ‘I don’t know how to paint’, usually end up painting. I coordinate and keep an eye on everyone and on each one’s personal process. Only at the end do I pass the ‘black line’, which is like ‘the director’s baton’ that unifies everything and corrects small mistakes.”
From October to December 2021, Cris painted 16 murals in different communities in Colombia, in conflict zones affected by the presence of guerrillas, paramilitaries or drug trafficking, where people really needed hope.
In July 2022 he went to El Salvador at the invitation of Amerindia, a group of Latin American theologians, and painted murals in several grassroots communities, trying to bring hope to stressed people in a country subjected to a state of emergency decreed by President Nayid Bukele. That same year he painted two murals in Guatemala, one in a Claretian community and the other in a Scalabrinian migrant reception centre.
Then came Venezuela, a country Cris describes as “devastated” because “it’s not poor like El Salvador; there we gave people hope in a very difficult reality”. He managed to return to Colombia in 2022, painting in some communities he had not been able to visit on his first trip.
In 2023 he was back in Argentina, always itinerant, painting murals in the Hogares de Cristo (Homes of Christ), which were created at the initiative of the Curas Villeros, priests from Buenos Aires who chose to work in the peripheries, inspired by the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the current Pope Francis. In all these centres— some of them dedicated to welcoming people wanting to rid themselves of addictions such as drugs or alcohol— Cris spent entire days painting collectively.
In 2024 he continued painting in Argentina and inside prisons at the invitation of the prison ministry. He travelled to Chile, Uruguay and, for the third time, to Colombia before arriving in Europe where he visited Rome and painted two murals at the invitation of the Salesians, in an oratory in Turin and in Moniga, near Verona.
Finally, he went to Africa. On his way to Kenya, after being persuaded to visit the country by his friend Jonathan Acuña, who is currently stationed there, Cris said: “Going to Africa is one of my missionary dreams. I have always dreamed of travelling the world to paint and be useful, but I think I have dreamed less boldly than what the Lord is giving me now”.
Although he has organised his programme with the Consolata Missionaries and the Xaverian Missionaries, Cris knows that “no matter how much you plan, new things always come up and you have to be open to new things”. He is aware that “Africa is not Latin America, it is something unknown to me, the times, ways, languages and cultures are different, but I know that I will paint. That is enough for me”.
