| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Luciano Calderon |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Barcelona, Spain |
| Date | 1986 CE |
| Style / Technique | flat graphic blackwork with bold outlines, no shading, and hand-drawn lettering, drawing on graffiti, punk, and Latin American folk and political graphics |
| Connected to | Claudia De Sabe, Maxime Plescia-Buchi, Duncan X |
Archive Note
Luciano Calderon was born in 1986 to a European mother and a South American father, and grew up split between two places that could not have been further apart. One was Bern, the orderly Swiss capital. The other was El Alto, the high city stacked above La Paz in Bolivia. By his own account that contrast, order against chaos, wealth against poverty, runs through everything he makes. He carried both places with him.
The craft came before the needle. Calderon took a degree in graphic design in 2007 and made designs for screen printing, work built on flat color, clean outline, and layout meant to reproduce cleanly. That training shows in the poster-like quality of his tattoos. He started tattooing later, and no reviewed source names an exact start year. Guest-spot activity is documented from about 2016, so the trade dates from the mid 2010s by a conservative reading rather than a fixed date.
His tattoo style is deliberately graphic. He uses bold outlines and avoids shading so the images stay readable, and he works hand-drawn lettering into many pieces because, as he told Grey Street Barcelona in a 2021 interview, the words make the work more personal. Independent tattoo listings classify him as blackwork, contemporary, and illustrative. The imagery pulls from graffiti and street art, punk, Latin American political graphics and folk art, and bootleg and pop-culture sources, often cut together as collage.
He works under a studio name that appears in three forms, 31 Klassik, Klassik 31, and the handle 31klassik, treated across sources as one identity. The "31" traces back to Villa 31, an informal settlement in Buenos Aires that early 2011 exhibition copy connects to him. His base has moved over the years. Early tattoo work was tagged to Klassik 31 in Mexico City, and he took guest spots around 2016 to 2017 in San Francisco, London, Paris, Hamburg, and Barcelona. By his account in the 2021 interview he had moved to Barcelona about two years earlier, placing the move around 2019. He lives and works there now.
The painting runs alongside the tattooing and feeds it. Calderon is represented by Ruttkowski;68, a gallery with rooms in Cologne and Paris. His paintings mix academic art with pop culture through bright color, satire, exaggerated figures, and signage, and they draw on Bolivian craft and weaving traditions as well as graffiti lettering and pixacao type. His first solo show, Street Dreams, ran at Ruttkowski;68 in Cologne from October 7 to 30, 2011. The group show Counterparts followed at Forum Kunst Rottweil in Germany in 2012, the solo El Choco at the Centro Cultural de Espana en La Paz in Bolivia in 2013, and the solo Vitaminas at Ruttkowski;68 in Paris, which ran to February 26, 2023.
In 2024 Afterlife Press published Bajo Mundo, a book built around his tattoo practice. It is a single perfect-bound paperback, 176 pages at 5.75 by 8.25 inches, ISBN 979-8-9891815-7-5. Rather than finished tattoos, it reproduces the stencils he used to make real tattoos, presented as the foundations of the work, set beside personal photographs and written reflections. He had appeared earlier in the same publisher's editorial title Disintegration issue 3, where his painting ran on the cover and an interview covered his life story, his outlook, his struggles, and his hopes for the future of tattooing.
What holds it together is the split he was born into. A Swiss-Bolivian who designs for the screen, paints for the gallery, and tattoos for the skin, Calderon keeps the same flat, loud, lettered language across all three. The two cities never resolved into one, and the work is better for it.