Graffiti News

Swiss artist Nicolas Party tagged graffiti on trains and walls around Lausanne and Geneva from the age of 12 until his early 20s. According to a Swissinfo interview published on 16 July 2026, he now draws large murals in soft pastel applied directly to gallery walls, and he is precise about what the street actually taught him. It was not rebellion. It was a graphic language that reads from a distance, and speed.

Three major shows in a single year

Party is 45 and works from a studio in Red Hook, a narrow stretch of Brooklyn. According to Swissinfo, 2026 alone brought three major exhibitions: Dead Fish at Karma Gallery in New York, Toile d’araignée at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels, and a presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong. A retrospective book, Murals, gathering his exhibitions since 2011, came out in the same period.

His pictures are easy to recognise: bold colours, simplified forms, compositions with the clarity of graphic symbols. He is also known for covering entire exhibition walls with his own murals and then standing framed works against them, which turns the architecture of the room into a temporary artwork.

The trains taught legibility, not rebellion

Asked where his colour and form come from, Party points to his years painting in public. From the age of 12 until his early 20s he tagged trains and walls across Lausanne, Geneva and the surrounding areas.

The way he sums up that period sounds less like an aesthetic than a set of conditions. "The main thing has to be visible from far away," he told Swissinfo. "It's a little bit like logos. You need a graphic language and bright colours that make the imagery recognisable very quickly."

A painting on the street does not get a standing audience. It gets a moving train, a passing road, a few seconds of attention. An image that works under those conditions wins on outline rather than detail. Swissinfo observes that Party's portraits are frontal and expressionless, almost icon-like, and feel designed to be read quickly.

Party also cites Michel Pastoureau, the French medievalist and cultural historian who writes on colour. Pastoureau observed that Swiss children grow up surrounded by heraldry: cantonal flags, shields, coats of arms. A visual culture built on clarity and symbolism sits underneath, absorbed without anyone deciding to absorb it.

Three paintings a year

Party studied at the University of Art and Design Lausanne, then moved to Glasgow, where he lived for six years and worked mainly in oil.

The problem was pace. Oil painting means layering, drying, constant revision. "I was making maybe three paintings a year because I kept reworking them," he said. "I liked the paintings once they were finished, but I wasn't happy with the process. I felt I couldn't work quickly enough to really make progress."

During the same years he was being invited to make murals directly onto gallery walls using spray paint and charcoal. Those works were provisional, physical and immediate, and became a counterweight to the slowness of the studio.

One Picasso pastel changed the method

The turning point came at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, where Party encountered Tête de femme (1921), a pastel portrait from Picasso's post-Cubist period.

"Something just clicked," he recalled. "I remember thinking: this is exactly what I want to do." The following day he bought pastel sticks, paper, and a postcard reproduction of the Picasso.

Part of the attraction was the limitation. Unlike oil, pastel cannot easily be corrected; it demands directness. "It restrained the possibilities and, paradoxically, it freed me," he said. "Suddenly I could produce much more work. And when you produce more, you progress faster because you see more failures and more successes. You experiment more."

Pastel on a wall

The technique now recognised as his signature, applying pastel straight onto walls, began almost by accident. While preparing an installation for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, a curator casually suggested replacing charcoal with pastel. Party thought the idea was technically impossible, but he was curious enough to try. The result transformed his practice.

Pastel is pure pigment compressed into sticks. Applied to walls prepared with a gritty surface, it sits somewhere between chalk and fresco. At mural scale it behaves unlike any conventional painting medium.

"The pigments and texture are so unusual at that scale," Party explained. "It's basically pure dust and pigment directly on the wall. And the process is extremely fast. With paint, you constantly dip brushes, mix colours, climb up and down ladders, worry about drips. With pastel, you just hold sticks in your hands."

This is where the line back to the street becomes visible. Sticks in the hand, no ladders, no drying time, a large surface covered quickly. The material changed. The way the body works did not.

A narrow set of subjects, repeated

Party works within a deliberately narrow range: portrait, landscape and still life, the most conventional motifs in Western painting. The conventionality is the point, the restriction a form of freedom, in the way Josef Albers returned to the square and Giorgio Morandi to his bottles.

"For me, landscapes, portraits, flowers, trees - these became my language," he said. "And over time I slowly add new 'families' of subjects. Recently I've been working on dead fish, for example. But I try not to introduce too many things too quickly. You need time to understand why a subject matters to you."

Many of his exhibitions start from encounters with historical figures, from Rosalba Carriera to Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. He describes referencing another artist not as quotation but as prolonged attention. "For me, copying becomes a way of creating intimacy with an artwork. Today we consume images so quickly. You look at something online for three seconds and move on. But when you draw or paint something, you're forced to spend real time with it. It becomes imprinted in your mind."

The years on the trains left no pictures

None of Party's teenage work survives. The trains were cleaned, the walls painted over. What remains is his own account and the interviews that recorded it.

Anyone painting in public now is in the same position. Once the early work is gone, there is no way to show what the years actually contained. The Wallscape map keeps work that was uploaded with its location, so the record survives the wall. The feed shows what is going up in cities now.

Party says he would like to work in Istanbul and Egypt. "Honestly, you would need ten lifetimes to explore all of these cultures properly."

Source: Swissinfo, 16 July 2026.