His candour has led him to talk about his work much more openly than many of his peers ever could, and his message is simple. Xavier Prou, therefore, is the real man behind the mask, and his unassuming looks and middle class, ageing charm distance him from the stereotypical image of a youth with a spray can and paint splattered trainers. Maybe due to this difference, or because graffiti is in many ways more illegal in the UK than it is in France, that Blek le Rat actually felt comfortable revealing his true identity after a while. Banksy meanwhile, said to have grown up in the Bristol area of western England and later moved to London, has always had his roots in the underground scene. Raised in a wealthy family with a private education, it wasn’t until his time at art school he came into contact with a world other than that of his own privilege.
Their art aside, Blek le Rat is in many ways the antithesis of Banksy. Can you tell which of the three images below is a Banksy? This shared technique does, however, lend a lot of visual similarity to their works, which many people fail to look beyond.
Banksy too has cited stencils saving time as being crucial to his work, as he found in his youth he would never have time to finish a whole piece in one go, as he was often interrupted by the police. He was arrested in Paris in 1991, and ever since used pre-prepared stencils as a time saving method, minimising his chances of being caught again. Banksy stands out from the crowd for his use of stencils, the heightened definition of his figurative characters helping to increase their impact, but Blek le Rat was doing this well before him, more for practical than artistic reasons. Many commentators have drawn similarities between his work, and that of Blek le Rat, a French artist born in 1952 and who started politicising street walls with his images in the 1980s. His disregard for the rules, on which as a graffiti artist his whole career has been based, was this time channelled against the system of the art market, a system in which Banksy’s influence has been growing for some time as the value of his work has increased in kind.īanksy’s fame as the elusive Bristolian graffiti artist has been cemented worldwide, but how much does he owe his success to lesser known forerunners of the urban / street art movement, and just how original is his blend of humour, social commentary and stencilled designs? To read more about the relationship between Urban and Street Art, take a look! In early October, the street artist Banksy destroyed one of his own artworks seconds after it had been sold at Sotheby’s Contemporary Art auction, an audacious prank that sent shockwaves through the art world and made national headlines globally.
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