“I want the characters of the paintings to walk out of the museums to give them back to the people of the city” he says. Alongside his rats, these have become his trademark style and have influenced generations of street artists around the world.ĭedicated to the idea of bringing art to the people, Blek often quotes the old masters like Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Guido Reni and Leonardo da Vinci. In 1983 Blek began to paint life-size stencils.

The rat, also an anagram for ‘art’, is in Blek’s mind “the only animal to survive the apocalypse“. He chose a different technique – the stencil – as more appropriate for the French architecture.īlek Le Rat’s first stencils were black rats, seen to be running along the walls throughout the centre of Paris. After his impressions from his visit to New York, Blek Le Rat started painting the streets of Paris in 1981. After a trip to the USA in 1971, Blek first witnessed the ‘wild style’ graffiti prevalent in New York City. He is the founder of the international stencil art movement.

In many ways, Banksy also uses the symbol of the rat as a way of aligning himself with the wretched and the underdogs whom he often speaks about or on behalf of in his works.Born in 1951, Xavier Prou (better known as Blek Le Rat), is one of the first graffiti artists in Paris. “If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model.” Instead, it seems he prefers monkeys for his original and editioned canvases. Given the relative importance of rats in the artist’s iconography and symbolism, Banksy has done a surprisingly few number of originals with them as the main protagonists. Banksy also realized numerous prints on paper in 2004, featuring various of his iconic rat characters. In terms of artistic output, Banksy has realized many murals featuring rats – mostly in England, and they tend to be smaller pieces.

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