A Hollywood Actor Just Curated Belgium's Biggest Street Art Festival. He Signed the Best Wall Under His Old Graffiti Name.

July 5, 2026

Matthias Schoenaerts has played a boxer, a hitman, and a man who wrestled a bull with his bare hands. This spring, in Ostend, Belgium, he did something his agent didn't broker. He picked up a spray can under the name he used before any of that, and put his own signature on the best wall of the whole festival.

Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

An actor's other name

Long before Schoenaerts was a Golden Globe-nominated actor, he was a teenage graffiti writer in Antwerp working under the tag Zenith. He crossed the Atlantic to paint alongside the Bronx crew TATS CRU, then kept writing quietly for three decades while his acting career grew around him. When the film industry stalled, Zenith is the name he went back to, according to Brussels Morning. This year, Ostend handed him the whole festival to run.

The Crystal Ship turned ten in 2026, and for its anniversary edition organizers gave curation over to Schoenaerts, Graffiti Street reported. From March 30 through April 11, more than 20 new murals and public artworks went up across the Belgian coastal city, turning Ostend into a temporary open studio while residents watched the work happen in real time.

Crystal Ship street art festival murals painted on building facades in Ostend, Belgium. Image: www.graffitistreet.com.

A decade, gone and back

The clearest measure of those ten years came from ROA. The Belgian artist, known worldwide for monumental black-and-white animal murals, painted Ostend's first Crystal Ship wall back in 2016: a pyramid of stacked creatures, a rabbit, a squirrel, a hedgehog, a mole, a mouse, built one on top of the other, as StreetArtNews documented at the time. That wall is long gone now, painted over in the years since. For 2026, ROA came back to the same city and started over, this time with a towering wall of seabirds and fishing birds pulled straight from Ostend's coastal identity, per the festival's own artist page.

The North Sea coastline and beach promenade in Ostend, Belgium. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Boxing gloves and a curator's statement

Schoenaerts didn't just curate from the sidelines. Working with Belgian painter Koen Van den Broek, he put up a piece called Round 4, a minimal, boxing-inspired mural built around a phrase about getting back up. It sits in the lineup next to Puerto Rican artist Alexis Diaz's hyper-detailed monochrome hybrids and New York writer Queen Andrea's typographic pieces, the kind of range a ten-year-old festival can afford to book, the Brussels Times noted.

Schoenaerts laid out his own case for why any of this belongs on a public wall at all. "Art in public space is not a luxury; it is oxygen," he said. "It turns passersby into witnesses, neighbors into conversation partners, strangers into accomplices. It grates, it disturbs, it connects." Creative Boom has spent years arguing Ostend built the model every other city's mural festival should study, and a movie star running the wall list under his old tag keeps that argument fresh.

A large-scale black and white animal mural by street artist ROA. Image: i.pinimg.com.

Why the name still matters

Nobody in Ostend needed reminding that Matthias Schoenaerts is famous. They needed reminding that Zenith came first. A festival built its whole tenth anniversary around that order: the tag before the name, the wall before the premiere. Ten years from now, somebody will paint over Round 4 the same way somebody painted over ROA's pyramid of rodents. That's the deal every muralist signs. The wall is temporary. The signature under it isn't.