Aies
I was born and raised in a small town in the Italian Switzerland. Since I was a child I loved spending time drawing and painting. I spent hours upon hours drawing huge cities full of details and details. Already at that age, I was fascinated by graffiti, I observed them and when I saw someone who made them I stopped to observe it, obviously without knowing much about this world.
In 2011, at the age of 15 I made my first piece, and in 2013, I became really active and steady with my name AIES. The spray technique immediately took me a lot, due to the fact that painting on the wall allowed me to draw my subjects on a large scale.
I don’t know how to categorize my letters, block letters modified in my own way over the years and always quite legible. However, I like to define my style as “soft” and “gentle”, due to the fact that I never insert edges or corners in my letters which are instead formed only by curved lines.
Being an illustrator I like to draw everything, so I always approach the letters of my name with figurative elements that for me have the same importance as the letters themselves.
In recent years, I focused a lot on the characters, a different one appears on each wall I make which often also interacts with the letters of the piece. Everything is then sometimes placed in a context, a place, a moment, a situation, or representing a small scene.
I take inspiration from everything around me, everything from the surrounding world can be a good starting point for me to be transformed into images. It is for this reason that the times that I carry a sketch with me are rare, or that before arriving at the wall I already know exactly what I am going to do, it will be the mood of the day, what I feel, the weather situation, or the season to define it.
Instead, to create my characters I take inspiration from a small sketch book that I always carry with me, where I sketch people I see around the city, at the bar, on the bus or on the train, and then reinterpret them in my own way in a more abstract way, playful and fun. In addition to spray cans, I like to use liquid techniques, in particular watercolors, and in recent years I begun to discover the possibilities of digital drawing and some small animations.
