Who is Frederico Draw (Frederico Soares Campos)

Frederico Soares Campos, who signs Frederico Draw or simply Draw, is a Portuguese muralist and illustrator, born in Porto in 1988. He holds a Master's degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, and began working artistically in 2007 through the Centro de Comunicação e Representação Espacial collective — a background that shows in how his walls are sited as much as in how they are drawn.

His subject is almost always a face. Working from photographic reference in a restrained, near-monochrome palette, he builds portraits at architectural scale and lets the building's own geometry cut into them, so that the figure and the wall are read together rather than one being a surface for the other.

The wall at the entrance to Porto

In Porto, on Avenida Vímara Peres beside the Luís I Bridge, AN.FI.TRI.ÃO — The Host — is the mural most people know him by: an elderly man with his hand extended, greeting whoever crosses into the city. It is a welcome sign the size of a building, and it has become part of how Porto introduces itself.

Curating the collective walls

Draw also puts other people's work on walls. He curated "Para Agustina — Extravagante Retrato de Família", the 120-metre collective mural along the CCDR-NORTE boundary on Via Panorâmica Edgar Cardoso, inaugurated in November 2022 for the centenary of Agustina Bessa-Luís. Thirteen artists from the north of Portugal each took one of her titles; the panel catalogued here is Third's reading of Fanny Owen.

That wall no longer exists. Over 16–27 June 2025 it was painted over by a second 120-metre collective mural on the same concrete, for the bicentenary of Camilo Castelo Branco, and again curated by Draw — among its panels, Francisco Fonseca's Tributo a Camilo Castelo Branco. Two authors, two centenaries, one wall, three years apart.

Projeto Ruído

He is also half of Projeto Ruído, the duo he forms with Contra (Rodrigo Guinea Gonçalves) — a collaged, archival practice quite unlike his solo portraits, and the authors of Murais de Liberdade, fourteen murals in fourteen towns for the fiftieth anniversary of the 25th of April. The murals signed Frederico Draw are the ones catalogued on this page.

Where his work stands

Beyond Porto, there is a mural for the MURO festival in Bairro Padre Cruz, in Lisbon; a wall for WOOL 2018 in Covilhã, the mountain town that turned its abandoned wool factories over to painters; a 2015 intervention for Muraliza in Cascais; a 2020 piece for AgitÁgueda in Águeda; and, the same year, a mural for Fazunchar in Figueiró dos Vinhos, out in the pine country of the centre.