Xavier Prou, which is his real name and we can now say it loud and clear because his identity was revealed back in 1991, continues to influence many street artists, and to amaze us all to this day. Rats were inspirational to him because they are, like he said himself, the only free animals in the city, but they also spread the plague rapidly, and it is something he finds analogous to street art. Parisians will probably not forget the giant rat that he painted in their city, which had special symbolic meaning for Blek le Rat.
His pseudonym has a lot to do with the first motive he happened to depict on the streets, and that was, obviously, a rat. Blek le Rat is the French pioneer of stencil art, a street art master whose work was both influenced by the New York graffiti style and picturesque architecture of Paris. And when being arrested for art doesn’t stop one from finding the ways to make it, you know that nothing is going to stop them. If you don' t have an invite for the show tonight you can always pop along to the London Graphic Centre in Covent Garden where Blek will also be signing copies of his book in-store on Thursday the 8th of May (1- 3pm).When Banksysays that his art originates in someone else’s, he must be talking about an icon. The private view/ book signing is tonight the 8th May and is invite only.
The show will feature many new works as well as iconic images tracing the history of Blek’s career, along with a number of prints – available from the gallery on the night. To celebrate the book launch the Black Rat Gallery is staging the largest Blek exhibition to date. In recognition of this Thames & Hudson have published a beautifully produced retrospective book entitled, Blek Le Rat: Getting Through the Walls. This is essentially the blueprint street artists the world over are still reading from today. Blek has always used his art as both a democratic means of bringing the gallery walls to the people and to change the way we interact with the urban spaces around us. Indeed, it was Blek’s silhouette stencil of a rat (an image Banksy was later to adopt for Bristol and London) as early as 1981 that broke away from the graffiti political slogans and injected it with a fresh new language of political art.
Banksy is on record as saying that, “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek LeRat has done it as well. Almost all of whom arrived a whole generation after Blek started hitting the streets of Paris back in the early eighties. Considered to be the father of stencil street art, Blek Le Rat (aka Xavier Prou) has had a profound influence on today’s current crop of street artists.
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