Dems is a Spanish writer from the city of Elche. He started painting in the early ’90s and has been pushing his style ever since. His relationship with graffiti is straight forward; he simply can’t live without it and is one of those writers who will paint to the death. graphotism speaks to him about the struggles of painting in Spain, his adventures in Europe and graffiti’s good old days.

What was your life and environment like when you were growing up?

I was always in a good environment. When I went to school I didn’t like the idea of spending all my time studying with everything that was going on in the streets. I was always thinking about doing different things, there were good and bad things but we always ended up doing the bad ones. Graffiti, break dance and rap came to my city in the early ‘90s. We would steal cans to do our first tags, wear the latest trainers and dance to break dance music in front of our houses.

Why did graffiti appeal to you when you first got started?

My grandmother taught me how to draw when I was a kid, I liked it but I didn’t know what to do with it. One day I was walking through a back road and saw my first piece, I was shocked because I didn’t know what the heck it was. But I knew then that that was what I wanted to do, it opened my eyes. After that I started walking around the streets looking for pieces so I could understand all about it. I started doing graffiti later than I wanted to. I think I started to understand graffiti around 1991 but I didn’t start writing until one or two years after that. The people I started painting with didn’t do graffiti because they were passionate about it, they did it ‘cos it was fashionable then. A few years later I met real writers and they are still active today.

Which artists were you inspired by at the time and why?

In the beginning of my career I was inspired by the writers from my city, Elche, they were Rosh Wild, Aito100 and Deik Ader. There were plenty of writers then, but when I started I felt that I was nobody and I thought I would never be able to reach a particularly good level. As time passed I started seeing graffiti from other cities like Alicante, Barcelona and Madrid. This also helped.

How different was the graffiti coming from those cities compared to the graffiti in Elche?

There was a huge difference. In those big cities you could already see incredible walls and pieces with thousands of colours, different characters and backgrounds. Graffiti in Elche was very limited, most of the pieces had only white and maybe another three colours. But at the same time we were special because they were unrivalled. My city wouldn’t be influenced by the bigger cities, that was the thing then, every city had their own style......

The FULL interview with Dems appears in issue 51 of Graphotism magazine - click here to purchase your copy.