Archie Hayes 
In Paris, you can usually spot a Hopare piece before you even know it’s him. Alexandre Monteiro — that’s his real name — has this way of fusing clean, almost fragile outlines with sharp, geometric slices that break a face into unexpected shapes. Most of his portraits are women. They look both solid and fleeting, like they could fade or shatter if you stared too long.
Lately, he’s been locked away in the studio, working toward his first solo show in Paris in five years. That’s coming in November. But last month, he stepped out for a moment — literally — and pasted up a 13-foot-high poster on a city wall. Black and white. No gloss, no flash. Just a quiet announcement of his new series, The Fabric of Silences.
In the image, a young woman looks off to the side, steady but not relaxed. She’s framed by flowers and a scarf, half pushing her way out of a rigid geometric border. There’s thought behind the eyes — not the kind that drifts, but the kind that drags.
“Its lines are woven from stories, from heavy gazes, from words kept deep inside,” Hopare wrote on Instagram. “This face belongs to all those who never had the space, the time, or the right to speak.” Out on the street, where people carry their own unsaid things, that hits differently.
The choice to strip his work back to black and white feels like a homecoming. Before the era of massive murals, street art here was smaller, quieter, more personal — the kind of thing you stumbled on, not the kind you planned to see. If this is the road he’s on, The Fabric of Silences is just the start.
