Written on Every Wall That Matters: An Introduction to Mongraffito
There is an old tradition of writing things on walls. Not the sanctioned kind, not the framed and gallery-hung kind, but the urgent, anonymous, slightly dangerous kind. The kind that appears in the night and is gone by morning, or persists in the margins of places where people think no one is looking. Mongraffito takes his name from that tradition, and then does something more interesting than simply invoking it: he inhabits it, expands it, and turns it into a sustained artistic practice that moves across painting, illustration, sculpture, poetry, and erotic prose.
His writing appears in Pulp Issue 8, the latest edition of the limited-edition queer zine published by Mark Alan of The Male Muse. But Mongraffito is not merely a contributor. He is a fully formed artist with a decades-long practice, a published book, an active visual art portfolio available on Saatchi Art, and a philosophy of making that is worth understanding on its own terms.
Who Is Mongraffito?
Mongraffito is a European queer artist who was, as he puts it, born before Stonewall, a biographical fact that shapes everything about how he makes and thinks about work. He came to painting late, through what he describes as discipline, failure, and "a long and sometimes brutal education in paying attention." He is a figurative painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer whose practice is held together not by medium or genre but by an insistence on honesty, about the body, about desire, about what it means to have lived a queer life in a world that spent decades insisting it didn't exist.
The name itself is a composite. Graffito, the singular of graffiti, means a writing or drawing made on a public surface. Mon, French for "my" but also a Japanese word for "gate" or "crest," transforms it into something personal and possessive. My marking. My gate. My declaration that I was here. This is not an artist interested in institutional validation or the machinery of the art world. He has written plainly about his discomfort with the title "artist", noting that Dürer didn't call himself one, that Van Gogh was a painter, and about his reluctance to participate in self-promotion, gallery culture, or the social commerce of the contemporary art scene. He prefers to let the work find its audience, trusting in the old Tarkovsky formulation: do good work, and they will find you.
The Visual Work: Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture
Mongraffito's visual art spans figurative painting, drawing, digital illustration, and sculpture, all of it available through his website and his Saatchi Art profile. The work is unified by a commitment to what he calls "unrealism", not abstraction exactly, but figuration that deliberately departs from accurate representation in order to get closer to something true.
His paintings move between oil and gouache and watercolor. His subjects are predominantly male, often nude, often caught in the specific tension between the erotic and the tender that characterises so much of the best queer figurative painting. There is influence here from a life spent looking, at museums, at antiquity, at the long history of men depicted for the pleasure of other men that official art history has worked hard to euphemize or erase. A series of small imagined portraits titled He, They, Theirs, Ours reconstructs a past that certainly existed: same-sex couples captured in paint, pulled out of history and out of the closet, as Mongraffito frames it, a tribute to love between men that left no Fayum equivalents, no sanctioned record.
His sculptures, he calls them figurines, because the word "statue" projects a grandeur and a scale he deliberately refuses, work with deliberate distortion. Proportions are altered. Genitals are enlarged, not pornographically but in the tradition of the ancient cultures that understood the phallus as symbol rather than scandal: virility, fertility, force. He carves in marble and alabaster and works from dreams that he transcribes into three dimensions with a fidelity that moves him, even when, especially when, the resulting object communicates something entirely different to its viewer. That gap, he argues, is not a failure of communication. It is where the artwork actually happens.
What he is trying to turn into hard material, across all his sculptural work, is feeling: the physical sensation of pain, the emotional complexity of dominance and submission, the weight of insecurity and desire. He describes sculpture as a cathartic medium and suggests, with a kind of careful generosity, that if one of his figurines recalls some pain in the viewer's life, they should hold it in their hand and use it as such.
The Writing on the Toilet Wall
Before Pulp, before the Saatchi gallery listings, there was the book. Published in 2016, The Writing on the (Toilet) Wall: Sleazy Drawings, Immoral Poems, Haiku and Drawing Pages is the work that most clearly establishes Mongraffito's range and his refusal of respectability politics in any form.
The title is both literal and symbolic. Public toilet walls have always been a site of queer communication, places where, before the internet and long before any legal protection, men found each other, left messages, made assignations, drew what they wanted the world to know. Mongraffito takes that history of anonymous, urgent, necessary inscription and turns it into a book: illustrated with drawings of sex in its many configurations, solo, coupled, grouped, and saturated with poetry that moves between encounter and reminiscence, humor and sadness, the fumbling and the transcendent.
The book has been described by one reviewer as a reminder that we are rooted in the earth, that whatever lofty ambitions we hold, we will always have one foot in the mud of the physical, and that this is not a diminishment but a kind of glory. The body fluids that appear in its pages, spit, semen, are presented not as transgression but as fact: things we are, not things that shame us. The vulgarity that a reader might initially perceive, the reviewer argues, dissolves into something warmer and more connective on closer reading.
This is entirely consistent with how Mongraffito thinks about the body. In his blog essay "I Sing the Body Naked," he traces his lifelong resistance to the association of nudity with obscenity back to childhood, to growing up as a naturist, where the naked body was simply what bodies were before the city required them to be covered. He has no interest in policing his own imagery. An erect penis, he writes, is as normal as a heartbeat: it is what that muscle does. His argument is not merely provocative. It is, in its own way, deeply considered, a position arrived at through decades of living in a world that insisted otherwise.
How He Thinks About Art
One of the most distinctive things about Mongraffito as an artist is that he writes, at length and with genuine intellectual engagement, about what he is doing and why. His blog is not promotional copy. It is a record of an active mind working through questions about perception, representation, the history of art, the nature of queer experience, and the relationship between maker and viewer.
In an essay on figurative painting, he draws on a Rizzoli Electa publication to trace the history of "unrealism", the shift, from the mid-twentieth century onward, in which figuration itself became suspect in avant-garde art discourse. He is interested in what it means to return to the figure after that rupture, and what figurative painting can still do that abstraction cannot: distil, as he puts it, the lessons of the past, the insights of the present, and premonitions of the future. He believes, without sentimentality, that works of art are the only inanimate objects capable of possessing a moral voice.
He is also bracingly clear about what he wants from a viewer. Not an explanation, not, certainly, from himself. He describes his works as residues, tuning forks left on a table. He is not interested in decorating walls. He is interested in the unlikely chance that something made in solitude finds an unexpected room in someone else and opens a door they didn't know was there. That, he writes, is the whole ambition. It is enough.
When asked how to categorize his work, whether it is gay art, queer art, or something else, he acknowledges the difficulty with considerable honesty. In a recent blog post, he quotes at length from a French theorist's argument that queer art poses a problem from the point of view of art history precisely because it resists the frameworks art history provides: biographical, intentional, iconographic. He does not resolve the question. He holds it open, which is probably the right response.
Mongraffito and Pulp Issue 8
When Mongraffito's erotic writing appears in the pages of Pulp Issue 8 alongside Mark Alan's photography, it arrives with all of this context behind it, even if none of it is visible on the page. The writing in Pulp is not illustration. It is not caption. It is the work of someone who has spent years thinking about the body, about desire, about what honest erotic writing actually requires, and about the long tradition, cave paintings to graffito, of humans marking surfaces with what they cannot keep inside.
His book is available through Amazon. His visual work, paintings, drawings, sculptures, can be explored and purchased through his website at mongraffito.art and through his Saatchi Art profile. His Instagram at @mongraffito offers an ongoing window into his practice. And Pulp Issue 8, where his writing sits alongside Mark Alan's most experimental photography to date, is available now from The Male Muse Store, limited to 100 copies, with no reprint once it is gone.
Some things need to be written on a wall. Mongraffito has been writing them, in every medium available, for decades.
Shop Pulp Issue 8: themalemuse.store Explore Mongraffito's visual art: mongraffito.art Buy The Writing on the Toilet Wall: Available on Amazon, Mongraffito on Saatchi Art: saatchiart.com
