The amazing voyage of the Denver artist known as Charlo

DENVER • The eighth mural of Carlos García Walterbach’s series around Denver was peculiar.

Conceptually, it was close to the others that brought him fast fame in 2020, that made him simply known around the country as Charlo, a nickname from back in Mexico.

Following others on neighborhood garages, this mural would span the wall of a business parking lot. It would be Charlo’s biggest, most-seen work yet with similar elements: a waving, swirling, monochromatic spread of lines and dots and symbols and letters spelling hidden messages.

Not so hidden from this one: the huge, blank circle in the center.

“It was the first circle I did,” Charlo says.

Charlo works on a mural on the outside bar at Tracks in Denver. The artist left Mexico in 2013, coming to America for a job in graphic design.

Christian Murdock/The Gazette

It was the head-turner of the mural he titled “Hola Denver.” It was a fitting name for the artist who had arrived to town just a year prior.

The name was a greeting and also an announcement: In an unlikely place and time, in a life journey as twisting and turning as all of those lines and shapes on the wall, Charlo had arrived. “Hola,” he said with a huge, mysterious circle.

Circles big and small are now common across his murals, some five dozen of them now decorating the city.

Since his humble self start three years ago in neighborhoods and alleys, Charlo has gone on to take orders from nonprofits and companies near and far — from an Amazon warehouse to a popular food hall and night club to bustling corners of Colfax Avenue and Washington Street to other commercial districts of San Francisco and New York City.

He recently took a job for United. The airline wanted his work in a lounge at Denver International Airport. That seemed like another announcement: Welcome to Denver, welcome to the aesthetic.

The man behind it represents an underdog story, an American dream — a young immigrant finding purpose and community.

It happened fast. So fast it seems Charlo, 35, is still comprehending it.

“It feels very overnight,” says his husband, Adam García Walterbach. “I think it’s so cool that people have welcomed and accepted something that he’s put out into the ether — something he was afraid to put out.”

It was a fear Charlo expressed in a TEDx Talk last year. He talked about his career as a graphic designer. Growing up the son of practical, blue-collar bodega owners in Mexico, that marketing work always seemed to him a safer career choice.

In hours alone, he always had a sketchbook.

Denver artist Charlo works on a mural on the outside bar at Tracks in Denver last month. He painted the mural in time for the Denver PrideFest celebration. Charlo grew up in Mexico before moving to Los Angeles to work as a graphic artist. He moved to Denver with his husband in 2019 and started painting garage doors during COVID-19. In three years, Charlo has moved from garage doors to an Amazon warehouse and a nightclub.

photos by Christian Murdock, The denver Gazette

“I only created art for myself in private, like a secret,” Charlo told that TEDx audience. “But then at some point, I couldn’t stop thinking about this one idea: making a mural.”

During the COVID-19 lockdown, he posted a request for a wall on the Nextdoor app. A stranger replied, welcoming Charlo to paint his garage. Then another, then another, then another.

And suddenly the fearful artist was an artist featured on local and national news. Suddenly, in our grimmest time, here was a story of connection and joy. Finding joy and spreading it — that was Charlo’s story.

He owned it on the TEDx stage with a dimpled, megawatt smile and a twinkle in his eye.

“This is my advice to you,” he told the crowd. “Whenever you get a clue of what makes you happy, stay there. Honor it. Be brave and explore it. It might trigger a chain reaction, a joy cycle that we can all be a part of.”

He meant it. He still means it. But there’s more to Charlo.

He is Carlos, his real name, to Adam and those who know him best.

“I think he’s pretty cognizant of the persona. He doesn’t want to be known completely as the joy guy,” says Adam, a psychotherapist.

“I tell this to my clients all the time: We wouldn’t know what joy is without having suffering right beside it. While Carlos is by no means depressive, he’s not someone who hasn’t had his struggles, either.”

Other side of murals

Charlo slips away to a back room of his downtown condo to retrieve some pages.

“I do a lot of art that is not what you see,” he says.

What people on the streets see are words in the murals such as “Together” and “Gracias” and “Loved.” The tone is different on these private pages. Compared with the walls, it seems the hand moved differently here, not light but harsh. Words emerge: “WHAT AM I DOING?” “INVALID.” “IWANTIWANTIWANT.”

Charlo fakes a smile.

Denver artist Charlo works on a mural on the outside bar at Tracks in Denver last month as the nightclub prepares for the Denver PrideFest weekend celebration.

photos by Christian Murdock, The Gazette

“I have my emo side,” he says. “I have my melancholy side. I have my angry side. I’m going to Metallica next year. My husband has me getting into metal.”

Charlo met Adam in California not long after leaving Mexico in 2013. He came to America for a job in graphic design. It was not going well.

“Very sweet and charming, but also pretty nervous” is how Adam got to know him. “I think back then he was used to people dismissing him, whether it was because of his accent or because he didn’t know a certain word in English.”

Charlo talked about his family back in Mexico a lot. “He would tear up a little bit,” Adam says.

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He would tear up over the phone with his mom back home.

“I remember his first business meeting in Los Angeles,” Roberta Flores Rosas says through a translator. “He was confident that he had mastered the English language 100%, but he panicked because he couldn’t understand anything that was being said. He wanted to quit and felt incapable.”

She encouraged him to stay strong, insisted that his future was in America. He knew she was right.

As much as he knew joy in Mexico, he knew trauma as well.

In one instance, his parents were robbed at gunpoint.

“The years before I moved to the U.S. … things were really bad,” he says. “I was almost kidnapped; I had to run away because the cartel was outside. My family and I spent a year away from our house because it was being watched.”

Not that the family had much money. From a young age, Charlo helped at his parents’ bodegas, hoping to limit their long hours.

All the while, he would draw.

“Notebooks, notebooks and anything he could find, walls, mirror frames,” his mother recalls. “I think it was a way for him to escape from his reality and express it wherever he could.”

In California, it’s how Adam found Charlo to express himself between his work in graphic design, from publications and marketing campaigns. But the expression didn’t come freely.

Charlo was still holding himself back as an artist, hesitating to accept himself as that.

Charlo hides messages in his Denver murals. “Flowers make me happy” is seen in this one.

Courtesy of Charlo

“The easiest way to describe it is fear,” he says. “It’s hard to say, but I think it was (knowing) I was not going to be able to live a decent life being an artist in Mexico.”

In America, in the silence and sadness, he was reflecting more, drawing more. He felt motivated by Adam, who was taking his career risks despite money getting tight before their move to Denver in 2019.

“That was a struggle we had to go through with our marriage,” Adam says. “We have to take risks in order to become the people we want to become.”

The pandemic was the last push Charlo needed to act on his mural idea.

“We might all die,” he remembers thinking. “I don’t want to die with the regret of not becoming an artist.”

‘El Puerto de Plata’

Perhaps Charlo had forgotten an important lesson from back in Mexico.

Death is at the forefront of life there for people who celebrate Día de los Muertos. Since birth, Charlo and his sisters heard about their grandma, their abuela in the sky.

“She died when my mom had just married,” he says. “Mom would always talk to us about her. ‘Look at the stars, and you can talk to her.’”

Death was ever present. That lended to a message that seems to him less than ingrained in American culture.

In Mexico, “there’s a sense of knowing that we’re here to enjoy this, and then we’re gone,” Charlo says. “I feel like in America, people are anxious about life. Like everything has to be perfect.”

Life isn’t perfect. Neither is his art. Nor is it always joyful, as much as his viewers wanted to believe when the pandemic struck and death confronted all.

“It can be joyful,” Charlo says, “but I’m not forgetting the truth of life, which is that there’s pain also.”

Stars are common on Charlo’s murals. As are flowers. The family name, Flores, is Spanish for “flowers.” Charlo paints them and feels the bittersweet tug of the home he left behind, a home that can never be.

Sailboats are also found on his murals, none more so than the one he painted back at the family house in Mexico. He called it “El Puerto de Plata,” meaning the Silver Port.

He talked about it on the TEDx stage. His voice cracked as he did. He put a hand to his heart.

“Growing up, my parents used to say that the goal was for my sisters and me to know we didn’t have to be scared of exploring the world. That we could go out and navigate the oceans to discover new lands to grow. And they will be there for us, strong and immovable, like a port made of silver.”

He went on: “I truly believe this allowed me to feel safe navigating the oceans. How little did I know I would eventually find a land far away from home, where I would begin with my husband the construction of our very own port.”

A framed picture hangs at the center of their home: an ocean of roiling waves, dark clouds billowing. Charlo’s parents never said the voyage would be easy. That’s life, after all.

Which brings Charlo back to the circles.

Since “Hola Denver,” they are all over his murals.

“I use them really as a symbol or representation of life basically,” he says. “Ultimately, life is made of many cycles that we go through.”

Joy, sorrow, joy, sorrow, none without the other. And at the end of every storm, a silver port.