For a little over a year, a boy in colorful pajamas crouched in a corner of Boston’s Greenway. The Os Gemeos mural in Dewey Square had its share of detractors, but many were sad to see it painted over earlier this month. While we’ll miss the Giant of Boston, as he came to be known, he’s been replaced by a new mural by artist Matthew Ritchie.

The Os Gemeos mural was always intended to be temporary, as is the Ritchie mural. “On the Greenway we only do exhibitions of temporary art, so nothing at this time is permanent,” says Katelyn Littlejohn Kirnie, the Greenway’s visual arts manager. “Part of the reason we do that is because we can be bolder and take risks with the art we put up.” A group of community art advisors helped select Ritchie, who is also doing an 18-month residency at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Ritchie’s mural, called “Remanence: Salt and Light (Part II),” is strikingly different from its predecessor. According to a description on the Greenway’s website, the abstract, gray-scale piece “depicts an information ecology where ideas or atoms of thoughts rise and fall between a sea of undifferentiated lines and an architecture of higher concepts.” The title of the mural references John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who quoted the Sermon on the Mount to the new settlers. He called for Boston to become a “City on a Hill” whose light cannot be hidden, and to waste not the salt of life.

Because of the huge scale of the project, organizers enlisted help from local sign-painting company Signs Unique. Founder Tricia O’Neil—who specializes in old-fashioned, hand-lettered sign-painting—used a grid system, projections and stencils to finish the piece in just a few days with help from her team.

“I think it’s really nice that it’s so different from the other work. It’s a totally clean slate,” Kirnie says. “Everyone has their own opinion, but a lot of people really like this work. We expected both ends of it, but we like that it’s starting conversation.”