He has spent much of his career keeping a low profile to avoid fines and arrest. He has since worked only with pre-stencilled posters, as these can be applied to walls much more quickly. The identity of Blek le Rat became public in 1991 when he was arrested stencilling another Caravaggio replica. Dedicated to his partner Sybille, it was a replica of Caravaggio’s masterpiece Madonna di Loreta. His oldest surviving street art installation dates from 1991 and was rediscovered behind posters on a wall in Leipzig, Germany in 2012. He soon adopted the pseudonym Blek le Rat, inspired by Italian comic Blek le Roc.īlek le Rat is widely credited with the invention of the life-sized graffiti stencil and the transformation of a lettering stencil into pictures. Stencilling rats, he said, gave him a way to stand out and be free of major city anonymity.

His description of rats as “the only free animal in the city” became a metaphor for the spread of street art, likened to the plague that rats can spread, as well as being the only wild animals that live in the city. His style was initially painting stencilled rats in the urban Parisian landscape.

Always having a love and fascination for street art, he was inspired by a visit to New York City in 1971, and began creating his own street art in Paris in 1981.

Known to many as the Father of Stencil Graffiti, Blek le Rat founded the stencil urban art form in Paris by the River Seine in the 1980s.īlek le Rat is Parisian Xavier Prou, born in the early 1950s. Long before Banksy took the world of street art by storm with his stencil graffiti, there was Blek le Rat…

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