Looks are deceiving

The artist, born in Ireland in 1967, has carved out his own place in urban art with a visual language that deliberately sets aside the conventions of street art. His work combines elements of contemporary art with the aesthetics of the street. He calls this approach “Urban Aesthetics.”Based in London today, Fin DAC is self-taught. Without access to galleries or museums, he found no way into the art world for a long time and first worked as a technical draughtsman, graphic designer and web developer. He was around forty when he first picked up a paintbrush. Painting female portraits became a meditative practice for him, a way to quieten the constant “negative chatter” of the mind. His influences range from Japanese woodblock prints, manga and graphic novels to Aubrey Beardsley, whose print left its mark on him as a child.Women Between WorldsHis figures move between tradition and the present: traditional dress and symbolism meet a modern sensibility. Pride and dignity run through the portraits, balanced by a playful streak that questions stereotypes. A defining feature is the painted mask worn by many of his female figures. Its design draws on Pris from Blade Runner and on the androgynous stage persona of Annie Lennox. The twin drips falling from the mask remain deliberately enigmatic. The small dot at the level of the third eye represents the artist himself.Murals in Cities Around the WorldHis training as a technical draughtsman, in which he learned layout, perspective and scale, forms the basis of his large-scale murals. Over the past decade he has transformed grey urban spaces across the world into vivid visual worlds. One of his most personal projects is A Quiet Moment of Contemplation (2020), a mural for the women’s ward of the psychiatric intensive care unit at the St Charles Centre for Health and Wellbeing in London. The work reflects his belief in the healing power of art.Exhibitions, Fairs and EditionsHis collaboration with Pretty Portal began in 2012 with the exhibition STENCILS ONLY 2012. Since then, nine limited screen-print editions have been produced together with Fin DAC and published by Pretty Portal.In 2017, Pretty Portal presented his work on its own stand at the Urvanity Art Fair in Madrid and at the Urban Art Fair in Paris. The Urban Art Fair in Paris followed in 2018, and the ARTMUC in Munich in 2026.In 2022 he took part in the group exhibition Mixed Reality, and in 2023 in Looks are deceiving.In 2024 he presented HomEage (Split Personalities), a tribute to the artists, movements and cultural moments that shaped his path. In 2025 came Carte Blanche in Paris, an engagement with Japonisme that brings 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints together with the Belle Époque and Fin de Siècle. With The Girls of Dactown (The GoDs)he extends his world of figures into three dimensions: a dystopian universe of cyborg assassins that now exists as life-size bronze sculptures and vinyl figures.“I create art to keep myself happy.” – Fin DAC

Faces without a gaze, bodies caught in a grid of cool geometry: SKIO paints the anonymity of the modern city with surgical precision. In his compositions, fragmented figures merge with stylized, often rigorously constructed architecture — a subtle dialogue between emotionally charged figuration and cool abstraction. Where the eyes should sit as mirrors of the soul, he deliberately leaves a void: it invites projection and makes the anonymity of modern urban life immediately tangible.His paintings reflect a present in which the self increasingly dissolves into the system — the uniformity our society imposes on the individual, as well as the beauty ideals that women in particular can barely escape. Some of his figures appear to wear VR headsets — a nod to a world in which reality and virtual reality have long since merged. Remarkably, although every image is painted entirely by hand, the aesthetic often recalls AI-generated imagery — an ambiguity SKIO plays with quite deliberately.Stylistically, SKIO combines the spirit of Bauhaus with Surrealism: he seeks a balance between complexity and minimalism, between softness and structure, lending his portraits an almost sculptural quality. His exhibition "Mensch & Form" (Human & Form) at Pretty Portal was, to date, the most consistent distillation of this visual language — a quiet, poetic examination of what it means to be human today, caught between withdrawal and visibility, structure and fragility.SKIO, born Nicolas Scauri, was born in 1980 in Nice and now lives in Paris. He studied graphic design in Manchester and industrial design at the Institut Européen de Design in Toulon. He painted his first murals in 1993 in the Nice region; after a phase of experimenting with typography andgraffiti, he found his way — via influences from pop and television culture — to his present figurative-architectural visual language. His work has been shown at exhibitions and festivals in Paris, London, Mexico City and Shanghai; in recent years, SKIO has increasingly come into focus among international urban art collectors.