Jonone – Clermont-Ferrand
JonOne
A pioneer of urban art, JonOne has constantly pushed back the boundaries of painting. From his experiments in Paris squats, where he transformed dilapidated spaces into veritable creative laboratories, to his collaborations with art craftsmen, he has always favored experimentation and dialogue with his environment.
His work, a veritable creative laboratory, is an invitation to rethink our relationship with art and the city. Blending traditional techniques with the most innovative materials, JonOne creates hybrid works in which matter becomes matter of thought. His canvases, often large-scale, are playgrounds where colors explode and mingle, creating dynamic, vibrant compositions.
Biography
This is the story of a man, of a creative act, of an explosion of colors, of a line winding from one country to another, of a crossroads in space and time.
This is the evolution of the artist John Perello, a young New Yorker who grew up on 156th Street, between Harlem and Washington Heights. After seeing the very first tags appear on the city’s screeching subway trains, he decided to join the movement under the name Jon156. Graffiti—with all its freedom and physicality—marked the dawn of a new era: a technicolor eruption, a true graphic revolution.
In the tunnels of the New York subway, Jon156 stood out through his uninhibited style, his challenge to conventions, and his love for abstraction. In 1984, alongside fellow taggers Rac7 and Kyle, he founded the street artist collective 156 All Starz, which would go on to become an international community. During a visit to New York in 1987, French graffiti artist Bando noticed his work and invited him to Paris. It was a turning point; JonOne has lived there ever since.
His five years at the Hôpital Éphémère, followed by a series of residencies in some of the decade’s most iconic artist squats and communes, allowed John Perello—by then known as JonOne—to experiment further, not only with technique but also with artistic mediums. While maintaining strong ties with the urban art scene, his work mainly translates the spirit of mural painting onto canvas. Just like walls covered in layers of tags, each canvas becomes a kind of palimpsest.
To capture his work without losing its vitality or raw energy, JonOne draws on the principles of action painting and abstract expressionism: the gestures become broader and more expansive; like Pollock before him, JonOne physically immerses himself in his creations—walking on the canvases, splattering them with paint, layering material and color again and again.
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