Known to many as the Father of Stencil Graffiti, Blek le Rat founded the stencil urban art form in Paris by the River Seine in the 1980s.īlek le Rat is Parisian Xavier Prou, born in the early 1950s. All over the world – in Europe, America or Australia, he paints the young beggar to challenge the authorities, because “sometimes”, he says, “images have more impact than reality.Long before Banksy took the world of street art by storm with his stencil graffiti, there was Blek le Rat… That same year, he began the series of beggars to tackle the problems of the homeless. This event was a pivotal moment because “I became aware of my strength and my responsibility as an artist working in the public space“. He pastes up hundreds of posters with the effigy of the journalist Florence Aubenas, kidnapped in Iraq, in order to call for the support of the media and political actors. In the mid-2000s, his work took on a more political aspect. “I would like to bring the characters out of museums to return them to the people of the city“. In a desire to bring the people of the city closer to art, he quotes the great classics such as Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Reni or Leonardo da Vinci. His works often represent solitary individuals that can be encountered in the urban space – women, children, old people and all kinds of contemporary characters. He is credited with being the inventor of the life-sized stencil, as well as the first to transform stencil from basic lettering into pictoral art.īlek, who has influenced generations of urban artists around the world, boasts a subtle social commitment and considers his images as a gift he gives to the city. In 1983, Blek began painting human-sized stencils. The rat, the anagram of the word ART, is for Blek « the only animal that will survive the apocalypse ».
His first stencils were small black rats that he made run along the walls of Paris. But when he began to paint in the street in 1981 in Paris, he chose the stencil that had a more latin style which he felt was better suited to the architecture of Paris. Blek le Rat, born Xavier Prou in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris in 1951, was one of the very first graffiti artists in Paris, and is considered the originator of stencil movement.ĭuring a trip to the United States in 1971, he discovered the first graffiti in NYC which intrigued and impressed him deeply.
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