Miedo12

born in Valencia in 1981 and was more interested in skateboarding, partying, and girls during the second graffiti boom, which had declined in Valencia, at least in his neighborhood, in 1997. He's not very aware of how it started, and he tells me this:

(…) Back then, we didn't have any means of transportation that could get to the garage, so we went on the public service train, ironically, and after about two hours of talking about how to paint it and trying to show that I knew what I was doing, we found a parked train, and unfortunately, I got the part of the machine that was red… Obviously, it was my fill color, and the piece was terrible. I finished. And immediately, the "platanitos" (security) arrived, and I ran through the orange groves as best I could with my bad leg from a motorcycle accident that morning.

Every graffiti writer is asked about choosing their name. In the case of Miedo 12, he himself tells it this way:
“…the main reason was marketing. My first signature was Zise, words that meant nothing, which meant that when I introduced myself, people didn't remember the name, so I looked for something meaningful. I chose Miedo. The letters are very similar to my real name, and their geometry is very good for design. As for 12, it's a bit of a superstition; it's a number that has always followed me at different times in my life.”

Miedo belongs to the type of person who needs to perfect, know, and learn, because as he says, “I don't know everything.” He recognizes his mistakes in the creation of a piece and irons them out with many hours of tireless sketching. A student of graffiti, he detects the original and what other masters have done. The attention to detail in managing an edge or a fill, as well as achieving a unique style, comes with a lot of practice. Getting the most out of the work tool, spray paint, for many a great unknown. Evidence of this are the calluses on the pad of his index finger and the joint of his thumb, the marks of the chronological journey of someone who strives for his street work, legal or illegal.

Emilio is one of those writers that Castleman's book describes as a graffiti master: he is one who goes through all the lettering styles and executes them with precision, and recognizes the mastery of their execution in others. Since he was a child, what interested him most was researching and mastering the styles of fanzines. With practice, he moved from one style to another until he mastered them all, creating the style for which he is recognized.

One of the most important moments in his career was his arrival in Milan, and this is how he describes it:
(…) Around 2005, I traveled alone to Milan to spend a few days at Rompe's house. By then, much of the BN crew had already been to Valencia on sporadic trips, partly to see Rompe, who lived in Valencia and with whom we at OSC had become friends. It's important to understand that I hadn't seen two-story walls, or walls of that size, until I went to Milan. Meeting them was like being in the movie Style Wars, but in an Italian version. They were writers who followed the rules of graffiti, with differences compared to Spain. The important thing was the lettering. Being from a much more cosmopolitan city, the values ​​were intact, since there wasn't the Spanish intention to please pedestrians by creating elements they could understand. They were and are graffiti writers considered as such, both by the graffiti world and by the public (this doesn't mean that the public outside of graffiti considers it pleasant).

For Miedo 12, traveling to Milan, meeting BN, and being made a member was an invaluable artistic and mental help.

(…) I saw a lot of styles, learned new techniques, and they made me realize that the best way to learn is to travel, explore, and see. In fact, I didn't make figures until I saw the techniques Boost used. In the same way, I didn't perfect my Wild style until I met Dosher (the best Wild artist during the 90s and part of the 2000s in Italy). The ideas of how to create large productions in which everyone complements each other based on a single idea, uniting all egos into one. In which, no matter how good you were, you were just one more, neither better nor worse than the next, implying that for a piece to be good, you must talk and understand each other with the person next to you. And what, in theory, would have nothing to do with graffiti was the fact that they were all people my age or older with their socially accepted jobs, but their hobby and passion was graffiti. An idea unthinkable in Spain.

From that moment on, with the Italians of BN, Emilio no longer painted small pieces, nor did he engage in vandalism: trains and walls; what older generations or younger people called authentic graffiti.