When looking at photos of Dezio’s work closely cropped, they resemble small paintings on canvas with thick brushstrokes layered on top of each other. Wide, colorful ones in the background and skinny ones on top, their textures gleaming. But really, they’re large murals painted with spray paint on walls. It’s an explicit goal of his, taking the fluid motions of raw strokes and scaling them up in what are normally very flat works that miss texture. “In my graffiti, I started to do a lot more brush strokes you can tell like those big brush strokes and like trying to in a way put back the creation and the movement,” the Shanghai-based artist says while in Hong Kong as part of the HKWalls street art festival.
He started writing graffiti in France at the young age of 13, and it was through graffiti that he really started testing the limits of what he could do with colors and paint. He’d hit walls where there only tags, and try and outdo everyone with full color pieces.
Eventually, Dezio transitioned into fine art and street art, and his two styles were distinct. “Before I had my painting style and my graffiti style. Now I’m doing one thing,” he explains. “I started doing giant brush strokes in my graffiti pieces.” As an example, he gestures toward the wall he’s working on, which is an abstract, patterned style painting of flowers and fish. “It’s kind of like half and half, everything is mixing together and becoming like one body of work.” These days, the main difference between his styles is that in graffiti, he focuses on letters.
Street artist, Dezio 
Dezio mural for HK Walls 2019
