El Diablo: from Paris graffiti to Lascars, and from Lascars to Montréal canvases
Published July 30, 2026
He started tagging in the Paris suburbs in the late 1980s with the PCP crew, published his first comic strips in Psikopat, then turned those strips into an animated series watched by a generation. Today he paints in Montréal.
This monograph traces a career that runs through four media, and explains why the paintings make sense only if you know the rest.
PCP, or how a crew becomes a studio
El Diablo began painting graffiti at the end of the 1980s with the PCP collective, in the Paris suburbs, at a moment when French graffiti was still an import barely five years old. What makes that crew unusual is what it became: rather than dissolving as its members grew up, it turned into a production unit, and several of its writers went on to write and direct together.
Between 1991 and 1995 he published his first comic strips in Psikopat, short stories drawn from his own life as a young man from the suburbs. Those pages are the origin of everything that followed, and they explain the tone of the work: comic, direct, written from inside a milieu rather than about it.
Lascars: a strip that became a generation's series
Those Psikopat stories served as the basis for Lascars, the animated series he co-wrote and co-directed with other PCP members and former classmates, later adapted into a feature film of the same name. Few graffiti writers of that generation left a mark on popular culture at that scale, and fewer still did it with material that came straight out of their own neighbourhood.
He is also co-author of the animated series Les Kassos, and a comics writer with several titles to his name: Un homme de goût with Cha, Monkey Bizness with Pozla, Rua Viva with Julien Loïs, alongside personal projects such as Wesh! Caribou and Radical Wars. Wesh! Caribou is worth noting on its own, since it turns his own move to Québec into narrative material.
Why the painting is not a side project
An artist who has written animation for years brings something specific to a canvas: a sense of character, of framing and of timing. A drawn image built for a screen has to establish a situation in a fraction of a second, and that discipline shows in painting through readable silhouettes, decisive colour and compositions that do not hesitate.
His painting also carries the graffiti origin, in the sense that it never seeks to be difficult. It addresses whoever is standing in front of it, without requiring a catalogue essay first. That is a genuine artistic position, and the one that street culture has defended for forty years against the idea that art must be decoded to count.
Montréal, second act
He settled in Montréal in the mid-2010s and has exhibited his paintings here since. Moving continents in the middle of a career is a real decision: it means giving up an established network and starting again where nobody owes you anything. It also explains the energy of the recent work, and a line he uses himself, that there is no time to waste around here.
For a Montréal collector, that trajectory is precisely the interest of the work. These are canvases by an author whose animated series is known well beyond the art world, made available in the city he now paints in, at prices that have nothing to do with that notoriety.
