Words by Sami Montague

Pisco paints dope, strong letters and his style is very individual. It doesn’t really look like anything else out there, and this is something that is increasingly rare these days. The letters are heavy looking, but still full of movement and high tension; they look like they are about to tear apart and send lethal, shrapnel-like shards of metal flying in all directions. To add to these letters, Pisco also paints some very good, realistic portraits. Hailing from Strasbourg France, he has travelled a fair deal and has painted a significant amount of walls in South America, particularly Chile.  Chile by the way, is another name that he writes…

When did you start writing and how did you get into graffiti?

I started writing in the middle of the ‘90s. A good friend of my brother’s (whose name is Guillermo) had been writing ‘Zulu Nation’ everywhere, and one night in about 1991 he took us with some friends to do some bombing. As we didn’t know anything at all about the movement we just wrote some stupid things like ‘Bob Marley is still alive’, ‘Peace and love’ and some other things like that. As I was more in to the punk movement I didn’t care about things like crews, or blackbooks; at that time it was just writing for the sake of writing. In 1995 I started to do some more letters in wildstyle, then I met Jekil who was more into this movement, and together with him and our mutual friends we started the PLS (Hastr, Dsar, Regan, Mazy…) then the DGF with Noise, Babylon Fucker and Abser later in 1996.

The name ‘Pisco’ is also the name of a popular type of alcoholic drink from Peru and Chile. How did you come to use it, and does it say something about your character?

Pisco is not my first writing name. I was writing another name previously, but back in 2004 the police started to arrest some people and it was at this time that I went back to Chile. I like to use different names to try various letters, but actually ‘Pisco’ is the name I use most and with this I became like a ‘virgin’ again. While I was in Chile I met up with my old friends from the LCP crew again, who I first met in 1998. So when I went back there we spent hours each night drinking Pisco and drawing, then bombing. As Pisco is a drink that you always have at any good Chilean party I started to draw those letters one night, then I ended up just keeping the name.

The FULL interview with PISCO appears in issue 52 of Graphoism magazine - click here to purchase your copy www.graphotism.com/Subscribe-Graphotism-or-MyNameIs-Magazine.74.0.html