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“An excellent addition to The Royal Haciendas.”

Art is present throughout Los Murales from the eclectic tableware to the sweeping views of the hacienda gardens, but its crowning feature – and that to which the restaurant owes its name – is the series of six Byzantine mosaic murals.
They are truly magnificent. Inspired by the paintings of Cuban artist Arturo Montoto, they are the creation of the Perdomo Family, masters of mosaic craftsmanship.

The Murals

“It was absolutely wonderful.”

The Los Murales mosaics depict the avocado, mango, watermelon, papaya, green pepper and tomato, all staples in the tropical kitchen, superbly depicted by Cuban mural painter Arturo Montoto and captured in tesserae by the craftsmen at Venetian Mosaics of Mexico, the Perdomo Family workshop. The murals are also our tribute to an enduring tradition of mosaic work in Mexico that dates back to the days of the ancient Maya and Aztecs.

Arturo Montoto
Born in 1953 in the western province of Pinar del Rio, Arturo Montoto is one of Cuba’s leading artists. He graduated from the National School of Art in Havana in 1977 and received his Master s degree in Fine Art with the specialty of Mural Painting from the V.I. Surikov State Institute in Moscow in 1984. He has taught thousands of students at the Superior Institute of Arts in Havana and has given conferences about his art in Cuba and at universities all over the world.

Mr. Montoto’s work has been the subject of newspaper articles, books, radio and television programs and he has even been captured on film in short documentaries by Roberto Chile and Yuder Laffita. With over 30 solo exhibitions and more than 80 group exhibitions, he has traveled the world and his paintings and photographs have found their way into private collections in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, United States, France and Spain.

The Perdomo Family
In 1949, former Zapatista revolutionary, politician and friend of painters such as David Alfaro Siquieros, Elpidio Perdomo founded Mosaicos Venecianos de Mexico in Cuernavaca, the first glass mosaic factory in the Americas. He employed gifted Italian glass makers from Venice who were skilled in Murano glass working and mosaics and willing to share their secret color formulas and techniques with local artisans.

Elpidio eventually relinquished the management of the workshop to his son Manuel Perdomo who embraced local raw materials and developed his own kilns, cutting tools and production processes to create a new enamel colored glass tesserae or tile called “Mexican smalti. “ There are currently 600 different shades of tesserae – including gold and silver – in the Venetian Mosaics of Mexico warehouse.
In the 1960’s, the Perdomo workshop began to use Byzantine artistic mosaic techniques for scenes and religious portraits, under the watchful eyes of artistic directors Jorge Rodriguez Moreno and Luis Scodeller who taught their employees how to do drawings for mosaics and the art of correct tile placement.

Affectionately referred to as the “Master,” Luis Scodeller offered advice to a long line of Mexico’s most famous muralists such as Siquieros, Francisco Eppens, Diego Rivera and Juan O’ Gorman who had wholeheartedly embraced the mosaic tradition. Perdomo tiles feature in many of their masterpieces.
Today, the Perdomo Family and their craftsmen continue to innovate and inspire, setting new standards in the art of mosaics, and their work is on show throughout the country and the world. Our Murals Take Shape Arturo Montoto’s paintings were digitalized and a plotter was printed for the craftsmen at the Perdomo Family workshop. The tesserae were carefully selected and cut, pieced together and then numbered individually.

The pattern was then painstakingly checked against the original painting for composition and color, a process called lifting, rather like an enormous jigsaw puzzle. The artists then made an aluminum frame and panel in the shape of the niche where the mosaic would be placed. Glue was applied to the panel and it was put on to an adhesive sheet. The tiles were laid and the mosaic was weighted down until ready to be fitted.