Some canvases come with a history already built in. Diego Tirigall found his in the underside of a skateboard. Based in Vigo, Spain, and painting since he left a career in motion graphics behind him, Tirigall takes decks that have already lived a full life, scuffed, dinged, worn down by pavement, and turns them into something else entirely. A simple-sounding premise, an impressively technical execution.
Diego Tirigall: Decks That Have Already Been Somewhere
Skateboarding and street art come from the same place. Both grew up on pavement, both born out of a restless, DIY energy that didn’t ask permission from galleries. Tirigall paints directly onto decks that have already been ridden, and that’s the point. The dents and scrapes aren’t damage to work around. They’re part of the composition before he’s even picked up a brush.
Each piece is one of a kind. Enamel, acrylic, oil pastel, oil, whatever the piece needs. Every deck is signed by hand, front and back, and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity. Some works stand alone. Others don’t stop at one board: Tirigall’s polyptych pieces assemble several decks into a single composition, several boards reading as one painting. It’s a bigger gesture, and it takes the same instinct that drives the smaller pieces and scales it up.
There’s a metaphor sitting underneath all of it, and Tirigall doesn’t hide it. Skateboarding means falling, adjusting, getting back on. It’s a discipline built on failure that doesn’t stick. That’s not a bad way to describe a painting practice either.
A Visual Language Built From Fragments
Text scrawled across a surface. Loose, expressive brushwork. Primary colors that don’t apologize for themselves. Tirigall’s decks carry the same graphic urgency that skate culture has always had, and it’s no accident. His references run through the street-art canon that shaped him: Basquiat, Haring, Shepard Fairey, Banksy. Names that turned public surfaces into serious painting, which is precisely what a skateboard is for him too.
The Bigger Picture
The decks are one thread in a much wider practice. Tirigall works primarily in street and pop art, and his catalog extends well beyond skateboards into small and large-scale paintings, gallery work, and private commissions. He came to painting sideways, first designing motion graphics for film, television and advertising before turning fully to canvas. That commercial eye never really left. It shows up as an instinct for a composition that reads instantly, even when what’s underneath is anything but simple.
Fragmented pop-culture imagery. Neo-expressionism and art brut, layered rather than chosen between. Picasso and Antoni Tàpies on one end of his influences, Basquiat and Haring on the other. Across every format, the same idea holds: images that raise questions instead of answering them, built from the space between what’s conscious and what isn’t.
Boards Worth Hanging on a Wall
The skateboards are a good entry point if you’re coming to his work for the first time. Each one carries two histories at once: the physical one, a board shaped for motion and worn down by it, and the painted one Tirigall adds on top. You can trace both at the same time. The object holds its past. The painting gives it a second one.
That’s really the throughline across everything Tirigall makes, decks, canvases, commissions alike. Take something with a history, ordinary or discarded or simply used, and give it a reason to be looked at differently. A skate deck was never meant to hang on a wall. Tirigall makes the case that it should.
Follow Diego’s work at diegotirigall.com or @diego_tirigall on Instagram.
Foto in header: Diego Tirigall
