JONONE / JONONE ROCK (né en 1963)

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40000 - 60000 EUR
JONONE / JONONE ROCK (né en 1963)
*Reflection of what I want ! Paris, 2011 Oil on canvas, signed, dated, ocated and titled on reverse 65 23/64 x 107 7/8 in. JONONE / JONONE ROCK * (né en 1963) Bornin 1963, John Andrew Perello, known as JonOne, is an American graffiti artist and painter from Harlem. The family and school difficulties that he went through guided him out of the traditional shackles and encouraged him to leave home. He discovered graffiti at the age of 17 and devoted all his time to it. He starts by tagging his name in the urban space, on blank walls but also and especially on subway trains that he sees as “rolling museums”. His meeting with A-One (or Anthony Clark), a famous American graffiti artist and friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a revelation. The latter endeavored to open JonOne’s horizons by introducing him to the world of exhibitions, travel and museums. He took him outside his native Harlem and pushed him to enrich and develop his artistic culture. In 1984, JonOne founded “156 All Starz”, a collective gathering several graffiti artists before moving to Paris in 1987. He launched the original graffiti culture alongside the pioneers of the French hip-hop movement: Boxer, Sharp, Jayone, Skii, Joey, Shen and Solo, respective members of the groups NTM and Assassin. He settled in the former Bretonneau hospital, which had become one of the major artistic squats in Paris, and began painting on canvas, a technique in which he excelled and which opened the doors of several galleries. His fame is rapid and is confirmed with different exhibitions in Berlin and Paris in the 1990s and by the interest shown by a large number of collectors in his work. His painting pays particular attention to the agitation and movement of color. Indeed, JonOne has developed his own personal style. His compositions stand out thanks to the invasion of the pictorial space by bright colors and energetic paint marks. His art stems mainly from the synthesis of two latent influences: graffiti writing and American action painting. He defines himself as “abstract expressionist graffiti”. The two paintings we present today fully illustrate the strength of his production. Proceeding by successive layers, the artist saturates the canvases with long and sinuous lines of varied tone on a largely brushed bottom. The monumentality of the formats reminds us of the urban genesis of his artistic production and gives these canvases all the strength inherent to urban street art, transferred to a perennial support.
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