Filipe Toner, of Portuguese origin, was born in France in 1978 and grew up in a working-class and immigrant family. He spent his childhood in Strasbourg. At the age of 10, he showed a keen interest in drawing and art in general. His parents encouraged him by enrolling him in drawing classes. At 15 years old, he joined the evening classes of the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg.
Sensitive to alternative cultures, he plunges with curiosity and fascination into the world of graffiti and wants to discover all its facets. He then painted his first frescoes on the walls of the wastelands of his district. When he was a majority, he moved to Lyon as part of a professional apprenticeship in the construction sector and began to practice, in parallel, a more savage graffiti, which he had already discovered on Strasbourg with other graffiti artists. Everything accelerated for him when he met a famous Lyon graffiti collective. His graffiti then takes on a more urban dimension, frees himself from codes, with an assumed artistic identity, which resembles him. It is tried on different media and in different places, all more underground than each other. His musical universe is also a source of inspiration: rap, metal and electro rhythm his work.
Toner gradually developed a style of characters that built his fame. He draws and paints many feminine subjects in the Pin-Up way, taking at leisure fantasmagoric and naughty postures, flirting with eroticism and provocation. Filipe Toner loves sex and abolishes codes, diverting the bodies and faces of imaginary women, both poetic, trash and hyper-sexualized, like chimeras out of her imagination.
Today his work has diversified on various media (large-scale murals, canvases, sculptures, face painting, etc.) and mediums (spray cans, acrylic paint, posca, ink, etc.). Toner varies themes and universes (tribal and primitive cultures, science fiction, fantasy, etc.). Multi-influenced, his style is similar to Japanese manga and is inspired by American comics, underground graffiti culture, 8Bits video game culture and tattooing.