A pioneering figure of French graffiti, Shuck One belongs to the first generation of artists who transformed painting the city into an aesthetic, political, and poetic act. Born in Pointe-à-Pitre in 1970, he grew up in a context marked by Caribbean independence movements. From these roots, he retained the necessity to act, to inscribe memory and struggles into public space.
Arriving in Paris in the 1980s, he quickly imposed his style in the metro, becoming an essential voice on the graffiti scene. His tags were not signatures but acts of resistance: occupying the city’s visual territory to affirm an identity and a history that had been made invisible. From the very beginning, Shuck One never separated thought from action: thinking without acting is futile, and acting without thinking is equally futile. Gradually, the artist moved from walls to canvas. With the concept of Graffic Artism, he invented a visual language that extends the energy of graffiti while opening it to other fields: the history of slavery, ecology, social struggles, and the emancipation of peoples. Each canvas, each mural becomes a space of memory and transmission, infused with the force of hip-hop and the vibrations of political consciousness.
His large-scale installations, such as Trans-Mission to Urban Ecology at the Venice Biennale (2019), or REGENERATION, presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2025 as part of Paris Noir, embody this poetic and political urgency. His permanent works, such as the one at the Mémorial ACTe in Guadeloupe, remind us that art is not only an aesthetic object, but also a weapon of liberation.
Thus, Shuck One inscribes himself within a historical continuum: that of an art born in the street, nourished by contestation, and now a major body of work that connects colonial memory, ecological consciousness, and the universal quest for emancipation.