James Bond', acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm
The first time I saw Blek in 1991 he was stenciling his Madonna character. Caravaggio’s masterpiece brought alive to everyone by modern means, I was intrigued. We started talking and haven’t stopped ever since. My struggle is to put this into a few words.
But the art of Blek le Rat doesn’t need many words because, as he says : “If you want to know me, just look at my stencils. His paintings just give themselves away.
After having studied the art of etching and architecture (a family tradition) at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, Blek, then simply Xavier Prou, realised that one couldn’t paint like Caravaggio or even Picasso on the edge of the 21st century. In oil on canvas, everything had been said and done. Inspired by graffiti he had encountered in New York in the early 1970s and a slumbering childhood memory of a Mussolini stencil he had seen in Italy in the sixties, he painted black life-size rats running along the walls in Paris in 1981 with a stencil. The rat, frightening, clever, revolving (regenerative) and most importantly omnipresent in Paris as well as in any urban space, is said to survive the human mankind in case of an apocalypse, and thus became Blek’s trademark and furthermore the metaphor of Street Art. And if rat symptomatically bears the anagram of art, urban art has spread throughout the world. So far that Blek le rat is coming to Metro, Melbourne, for his first show down Under, as we call Australia at the other end of the world.
“Warhol turned to photographs of stars, as the Renaissance turned to antiquities, to find images of gods,” art critic David Sylvester says. Blek, true heir Andy Warhol’s, followed and continued the way paved by his master : he’s turned to the people themselves. The stencil became the key to the world of art, litterally opened the doors both to spectators and creators. People who would not necessarily walk into museums encounter art on their way to work. Whether they like it or not, the fact that they didn’t pay and thus didn’t expect to see it, engenders an always authentic and private alliance between the passer-by and the the image on the wall. And just like Warhol made us reconsider the myth of the painter, Blek says, “you don’t need to go to art school to make a stencil”. The stencil has become the favourite mean of expression in Urban Art, if not the very symbol of the democratization of art.
Some would argue that Street Art doesn’t belong in the closed space of a gallery. It is true that the aha-reaction is unique in the living environment of the public space just like one has to have seen a movie at the theatre before viewing a dvd. If Street Art is by its very nature ephemeral, photographs are the sole witnesses, the Memory keepers of what has become the biggest art movement ever and that is the point. Yet, the stencil is more than a young art technique, it has eventually become an art form of its own, a style. “Le Ciel Est Bleu, La Vie Est Belle “is proof of it.
Blek‘s first exhibition on Australian ground is an iconographic journey featuring more than 30 ( ?) works including iconic characters stenciled on wooden panels, spraypaints on canvas, screen-prints and photographs. “Le Ciel Est Bleu, La Vie Est Belle “, The sky is blue, life is beautiful, thoroughly ironic, traces Blek’s œuvre from the early eighties over iconic characters to most recent works. The exhibition will be on view from December 3 through …….., 2009 at Metro Gallery, Melbourne.
“I want to give food for thoughts,” he says
Since Blek started the stencilism back in the 1980s he has been a witness of his time who looks back and forward, invents but actually mirrors what happened (The revisited theme of Adam and Eve, happens (The beggar-child and the old homeless who is none other Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, with whom Blek tackles the problem of the homeless) or is going to happen like “The Venus of Milo” who shows, true greek comedy style, her middle-finger to the declining macho world.
Although Blek enjoys swapping images, he has too much respect for the feelings and thoughts of the others to turn turn his stencils into distateful or vulgar characters. He wants “to give food for thoughts”, never kidnappes the beholder, always leaves some private space for imagination, sometimes is ahead of his time.
Sybille Prou
November 2009
November 2009
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