JONONE

JONONE,  born John Andrew Perello, is an American contemporary artist born in New York in 1963. He grew up on 156th Street, between Harlem and Washington Heights, surrounded by the emergence of New York hip-hop and graffiti culture. Fascinated by the signatures appearing across subway trains, he began painting as a teenager under the name Jon156, gradually transforming the repeated writing of his name into a distinctive pictorial language.

In 1984, he founded the 156 All Starz collective with Rac7 and Kyle, which would later develop into an international graffiti community. Even at this early stage, JonOne stood apart through his unusually free approach to graffiti. Rather than focusing primarily on figurative imagery, he became increasingly interested in movement, rhythm and abstraction, turning the repetition of the tag itself into visual material.

His encounter with French graffiti artist Bando marked a decisive turning point. Invited to Paris, JonOne moved there in 1987 and quickly became part of the city's thriving alternative art scene. At the Hôpital Éphémère, a former hospital transformed into an artists' space, he worked alongside figures including A-One, Sharp, JayOne and Skki and began transferring the energy of graffiti onto canvas.

This transition from wall to canvas became fundamental to his practice. Tags, signs, lines and fragments of writing accumulate into densely layered abstract compositions. Language gradually loses its conventional meaning and becomes gesture, rhythm and color. Each canvas functions almost like a palimpsest, preserving traces of the successive layers beneath its surface.

JonOne's paintings establish a strong dialogue with Abstract Expressionism and Action Painting. He has cited artists including Jackson Pollock and Joan Mitchell as influences and has also emphasized his affinity with the gestural language of Georges Mathieu. Like these artists, JonOne physically engages with the act of painting, using sweeping gestures, dripping, splashing and repeated layers to preserve the raw energy of graffiti within the studio.

Color is one of the defining elements of his visual language. Electric yellows, reds, blues, pinks, greens and blacks overlap within dense networks of marks where order and chaos appear to coexist. Behind the apparent spontaneity of his gesture lies a carefully constructed sense of rhythm, contrast and spatial balance.

This distinctive language gradually enabled JonOne to move beyond conventional boundaries between graffiti, urban art and contemporary painting. His work has been exhibited internationally and extended across a wide variety of media through collaborations with Air France, Guerlain, Lacoste, Daum and the Faïencerie de Gien, bringing his energetic calligraphic language into dialogue with fashion, aviation, perfume, crystal and decorative arts.

In 2015, JonOne created Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, a monumental work for the French National Assembly, and was appointed a Knight of the Legion of Honour. The recognition symbolized the remarkable journey of an artist whose visual language evolved from New York subway graffiti to major French institutions.

His work continues to receive significant institutional recognition. In 2023, La Piscine – Musée d’Art et d’Industrie André Diligent in Roubaix presented his first major retrospective. His work was subsequently shown in Shenzhen and at Incheon International Airport in 2024, followed in 2025 by an intervention at the Monnaie de Paris establishing a dialogue with Georges Mathieu and the exhibition Panorama at the Chapelle de l’Observance in Draguignan.

Across more than four decades of practice, JonOne has transformed the graffiti tag into a language of abstraction, preserving the freedom and energy of the street while developing a deeply personal form of painting in which writing, color and movement become inseparable.

Discover JonOne’s artworks available at Galerie De Medicis, Place des Vosges in Paris, and explore the artist’s vibrant universe through paintings combining graffiti, abstraction, calligraphy and color.