Jonone

JonOne was born John Perello in New York in 1963, to a Dominican family, and grew up on 156th Street between Harlem and Washington Heights. He began writing in the late 1970s under the name Jon156, taken from his own street, at the point when the subway system was the only exhibition space that mattered. In 1984 he founded the crew 156 All Starz with Rac7 and Kyle. In 1987 the French writer Bando, visiting New York, saw his work and invited him to Paris; he moved that year and has lived and worked there since.

Paris changed the work rather than merely relocating it. Five years at the Hôpital Éphémère, a decommissioned hospital turned artists' quarters, and a run of residencies in squats and communes gave him space, time and materials he had never had, and the tag began to open out. What had been a name became a field. The letters are still there — buried, overwritten, occasionally surfacing — but the canvases are built as accumulations of gesture: paint poured, flung, dripped and dragged, layer over layer, until the surface reads as sedimentary rather than composed.

The reference points he acknowledges are the American abstract expressionists, Pollock above all, and the comparison holds in method as much as appearance. He works on canvases laid flat and walks into them, and the paintings keep the record of that movement. But the underlying logic remains the one he learned in the tunnels: a wall is a palimpsest, every mark sits on top of somebody else's, and the accumulation is the meaning. What arrived in Paris as graffiti became a way of painting that neither the street nor the museum could claim exclusively.

Colour carries the work. Where much post-graffiti painting is anchored by black outline, JonOne's canvases are built almost entirely from saturated hue, applied wet into wet so that the layers bleed rather than separate. The effect is atmospheric and disorienting — closer to weather than to lettering — and it is what has allowed the work to travel so far from its origins without losing them.

He was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 2015, presented by the President of the French National Assembly, and in the same year painted Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, a reworking of Delacroix commissioned for the Palais Bourbon and installed in the Salon des Mariannes. His first museum retrospective was held at La Piscine, Musée d'art et d'industrie André Diligent, Roubaix, in 2023.

Alongside the paintings he has worked repeatedly across design and craft — an Air France aircraft livery, a Guerlain bottle, a Lacoste collection, crystal for Daum and faience for the Faïencerie de Gien — on the consistent argument that art has no business staying indoors.

SELECTED CV

Born 1963, New York, NY, USA

Lives and works in Paris, France

Education and Training

Self-taught

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2023 Palimpseste, Galerie Rabouan Moussion, Paris, France

2023 Contemplations, Galerie David Pluskwa, Marseille, France

2022 Sur le fil, Galerie Brugier-Rigail, Seoul, South Korea

2020 Galerie Veyssière, Tours, France

1992 Speerstra Gallery, Monaco

1990 Graffitism, Galerie Gleditsch 45, Berlin, Germany

Selected Group Exhibitions

2023 Beats and Rhymes, Speerstra Gallery, Paris, France

2017 XXL #1, Fondation Montresso, Marrakech, Morocco

Museum and Institutional Exhibitions

2023 La tentation du décor, La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, Roubaix, France (solo)

2023 The World of Tomorrow, Musée du Touquet-Paris-Plage, Le Touquet, France (solo)

2022 The Big Takeover, Hôtel Goüin, Tours, France (solo)

2019 Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France

2019 The Palace Museum, Forbidden City, Beijing, China

2018 Héritage, Museum of Black Civilisations, Dakar, Senegal (solo)

2018 Illuminating the Future, Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat, Morocco (solo)

2018 Abstracted Love, Palais de la Bourse, Marseille, France (solo)

2017 The Empire of Signatures, Fondation Clément, Le François, Martinique (solo)

2016 Above and Below, Carré Sainte-Anne, Montpellier, France (solo)

2015 The King of Harlem, Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez, Bordeaux, France (solo)

2009 Né dans la rue – Graffiti, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France

Awards, Honours and Residencies

1990 Resident, Hôpital Éphémère, Paris, France (1990–1995)

Selected Public Commissions and Projects

2015 Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Assemblée nationale, Palais Bourbon, Paris, France

2014 Mural, Hôpital Bichat, Paris, France

Aircraft livery for Air France; bottle designs for Guerlain, Perrier and Hennessy; editions for Cristallerie Daum and Faïencerie de Gien; textiles for agnès b.; capsule collection for Lacoste