JonOne

Overview

JonOne was born John Andrew Perello in 1963 in New York, and grew up on 156th Street between Harlem and Washington Heights, the child of parents from the Dominican Republic. He was seventeen when he began tagging with a childhood friend, writing his name as Jon with the number of his street, and he became known in the tunnels of the subway system as Jon156. He has said that the subway is a museum that runs through the city, and that idea, of a picture that travels and is seen by everyone, never really left the work.

In the mid eighties he founded the crew 156 All Starz with fellow writers, a collective that grew into an international network. The French writer Bando saw his work on a visit to New York and invited him to Paris, and JonOne has lived there ever since. His five years at the Hopital Ephemere, a hospital building in the eighteenth arrondissement squatted by artists, were decisive. Painting there alongside A One, Sharp, Victor Ash, Jayone and Skki, he made the move from wall to canvas.

The work

What survived the move was the gesture. JonOne is a self taught abstract painter whose canvases work as palimpsests, layer over layer of tags, splashes, drips and saturated colour until the letters dissolve into pure movement. The lineage he claims is not only graffiti but action painting and abstract expressionism: like Pollock he walks across the canvas, floods it, and builds the surface up in successive passes. The results are dense and high key, closer to a wall that has been written on for twenty years than to a composed picture.

He made his name in Parisian circles through canvases and gallery shows, including an early exhibition at Gallery 45 Gleditsch in Berlin in 1990. Since then he has worked steadily to break down the partition between the street, the gallery and the museum, which in practice has meant a long run of collaborations with brands and manufacturers: a customised Air France jumbo jet, a Guerlain perfume bottle, a capsule collection for Lacoste, crystal for Daum and painted pieces for the Faiencerie de Gien. His first retrospective was held at La Piscine in Roubaix in 2023.

The market and the LLB lots

JonOne's market divides sharply between unique canvases and editions, and the two LLB lots sit on either side of that line. At Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr in Brussels, Gamers, an acrylic and ink on canvas signed, titled and located Paris on the reverse and measuring 102 by 105 centimetres, made EUR 7,040 including premium in 2024. That is a fair guide to what a medium sized, fully worked canvas by him does at auction.

LLB has offered an acrylic on canvas that did not find a buyer against an estimate in the five thousand to ten thousand euro band, and a screenprint titled Untitled Blue that sold at the low end of its estimate. The pattern is ordinary for this artist rather than a warning sign: his signed screenprints are widely available and trade in the hundreds, while canvases need to be right in scale, density and period to make the estimates that unique work attracts.

What to check before buying

For canvases, look for the signature, title, date and the word Paris on the reverse, which is his habitual inscription, and confirm the work came through a gallery rather than direct. Provenance through an established dealer matters more here than with most artists, because the tag itself is easy to imitate and the paintings are not. For prints, establish the edition size and whether the sheet is signed and numbered in pencil, since unsigned posters and open edition reproductions of his imagery circulate widely and are worth a small fraction of a signed impression.