Dasic Fernandez cannot remember precisely how or when he became an artist. Fascinated by Chile’s burgeoning hip-hop culture of the 1990s, he searched for a way to engage with it in public spaces. By the age of 14, he had found his answer in graffiti art. Today, the Santiago-born artist is a muralist of rising fame whose works dot urban landscapes across the Americas.
Fernández, who speaks with the cadences and dropped consonants of his native Chile, grew up in the small, rural town of Rancagua. He began painting simply by graffiti-tagging buildings with the stylized letters of his name. At the University of Chile in Santiago, where he studied architecture, he explored the impact of art on urban spaces while experimenting with content, themes and style for his own art. “I became more in love with painting on the street than with being in class,” he recalls. In his fourth year he left university to experience art in other parts of the world, including Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and eventually New York, where he moved in December 2009.