Collection: Blek le Rat | Father of Stencil Art
Blek le Rat — Xavier Prou, born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1951 — is the founding figure of stencil art: the French artist who, having encountered New York graffiti during a visit to the United States in 1971, returned to Paris and in 1981 began painting stencils on the city's walls in a style he felt was better suited to Parisian architecture than the American approach. His first stencils were small black rats — the rat being, as he noted, the anagram of ART, and the only animal that will survive the apocalypse. By 1983 he had invented the life-sized stencil, transforming what had been a technique for lettering into a medium for pictorial art. Every significant stencil artist who has worked since — Banksy explicitly among them, who has described Blek as his primary influence — works in the tradition he created.
His practice has always been rooted in a specific social commitment: the image as a gift to the city, the art brought out of museums and returned to the people of the streets. His subjects are the solitary individuals of urban life — women, children, the elderly, the homeless — and the great figures of art history, whose works he has translated from canvas to wall in the belief that Caravaggio and Michelangelo belong to everyone, not only to those who can afford museum admission. "I would like to bring the characters out of museums to return them to the people of the city," he has said.
His political engagement deepened in the mid-2000s, when he began plastering Paris with images of the kidnapped journalist Florence Aubenas to pressure the media and political establishment into action. The response taught him something important: "I became aware of my strength and my responsibility as an artist working in the public space." His subsequent series of young beggars — painted across Europe, America, and Australia — has challenged authorities worldwide with the specific force of an image that, as he observes, sometimes has more impact than reality.
Available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.