Street Artist in the Spotlight: Hunto
Italian-born, London-based artist Renato Hunto has developed an unmistakable visual language of fractured faces, intertwined bodies and saturated colour. Born in Brindisi, southern Italy, his early encounter with the work of Pablo Picasso helped shape a lasting fascination with Cubism, while graffiti gave him the speed, instinct and freedom to translate those influences onto trains and onto the street.
Hunto, Shoreditch, London. Photo © Alex Stanhope / GraffitiStreet
After becoming involved in graffiti as a teenager, Hunto gradually moved from lettering towards the human figure. Love, desire, intimacy and relationships became recurring subjects, expressed through overlapping profiles, bodies and gestures that appear simultaneously fragmented and connected. His work draws upon Picasso and Braque without simply imitating Cubism, filtering that history through the energy and immediacy of contemporary street culture.
Cubism, Colour and Human Connection
The human figure sits at the heart of Hunto’s practice. Faces split into profiles, bodies overlap and colours collide, reducing complex relationships into bold lines and interlocking forms.
What can initially appear playful often carries a more intimate undercurrent. Hunto has repeatedly explored eroticism, affection, desire and the complicated ways people connect with one another, while his familiar phrase “Hunto Says”has become part signature, part ongoing conversation with the street.
His approach retains the spontaneity of graffiti. The compositions are direct and instinctive, allowing strong outlines and intense colour to carry emotion without requiring detailed realism.
Hunto, the Streets of London and beyond
London, and Shoreditch in particular, has played a central role in Hunto’s development. His brightly coloured figures became a familiar presence across Brick Lane and the surrounding East End, appearing on shutters, walls, shopfronts and temporary surfaces that reflected the constantly changing character of the neighbourhood. GraffitiStreet documented him painting Brick Lane in 2016, capturing a practice still deeply connected to the speed and unpredictability of the street.
His visual language has since travelled into very different parts of the capital. In 2017 he brought his figures into Carnaby Street and Soho, while also experimenting with body painting, turning the human body itself into another surface for his fractured shapes and colour.
Hunto’s murals have also carried this language internationally. At Gare de Lyon in Paris in 2018, his fractured figures and vivid palette appeared within one of the city’s major transport hubs, an especially fitting location for work concerned with encounters, movement and relationships.
Later public projects have included the German Embassy for London Mural Festival in 2024, followed by a large mural at EartH Hall in Hackney and Portraits in Colour for the Kingston Street Art Festival in 2025. Across each setting, the scale and architecture change, but Hunto’s central language of faces, colour and human connection remains immediately recognisable.
Related Reading: Hunto
GraffitiStreet’s Interview with Hunto, looks back at his early graffiti years, the influence of Picasso and the development of the distinctive figurative language that came to define his practice.
Hunto’s Colourful Street Art Brightens Up a Rainy Day on Brick Lane captures him painting in Shoreditch in 2016, offering a first-hand record of a neighbourhood closely associated with his London story.
In Hunto Brings Life to His Street Art Designs with Body Painting, his fragmented figures leave the wall altogether, turning the human body into part of the artwork.
Hunto Brings Love to the Streets of Soho follows his 2017 Carnaby Street project, while Street Artist Hunto Paints in the City of Love documents his colourful intervention at Gare de Lyon in Paris.
More recently, Hunto’s Bold Mural at the German Embassy records his contribution to London Mural Festival 2024, followed by Love on the Streets: Hunto’s New Mural Transforms EartH Hall and Portraits in Colour in 2025.
GraffitiStreet has also documented Hunto closer to home in Street Art in the Historic City of Chichester, where one of his murals became part of the city’s growing urban-art story.
More Artists in the Spotlight
For another artist exploring Cubist influence, geometry and fragmented human forms, discover Ruben Sánchez, whose Mediterranean palette and interlocking figures move between graffiti, muralism and studio painting. Explore PichiAvo for another practice that places art history into direct dialogue with contemporary graffiti, or Joachim, whose expressive figures share Hunto’s instinctive approach to colour, gesture and the human form.
Discover Hunto at GraffitiStreet
GraffitiStreet has worked with and documented Hunto for more than a decade, from the streets of Shoreditch and early studio works to exhibitions at our Chichester gallery.
Hunto – Mae West (Front). Available via GraffitiStreet.
Explore Hunto at GraffitiStreet to discover available original works and editions, or contact GraffitiStreet for acquisitions, sourcing, mural enquiries and private viewings.
Visit GraffitiStreet Gallery, 25A West Street, Chichester, West Sussex, England PO19 1QW.