Within the 37 works that are currently on show at Woodbury House is a large scale triptych that memorialises the figure of Hambleton and serves as testament to his enduring influence on Prou’s practice. “He was the first graphic artist to export his work abroad and, after seeing it in Paris in 1983, he became a big inspiration for me.”
“I wanted to make a tribute to my favourite street artist,” says Prou. Prou, of course, has his own artistic influences and has drawn heavily on one in particular for this latest exhibition - the late Canadian artist Richard Hambleton, who has long been a source of inspiration for the 72-year-old Parisian.
Bansky is even quoted as saying: “Every time I think I’ve painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only 20 years earlier.” The Red Leopard Song For The Dead Having risen to prominence in the 80s, after he began spraying stencil artworks of rats around his home city of Paris, Prou went on to become an influential figure in the street art scene, inspiring everyone from Banksy to Swoon to Logan Hicks. Like repressed experiences or feelings that suddenly shoot back into consciousness, the crows seem to haunt the disembodied worker in a Hitchcock-like manner.Showing at Woodbury House in London is The Return of The Rat - the first UK exhibition by iconic French street artist Blek le Rat (born Xavier Prou) in over a decade. Le retour du refoulé ( The Return of the Repressed) is both the title of Levalet’s in situ work at the Völklingen Ironworks World Cultural Heritage Site, and a psychoanalytical term coined by Sigmund Freud. This meticulous manual aspect sets his works apart in the crowded world of street art. His highly realistic black and white figures have all been applied to paper by hand, and then pasted onto surfaces. Where Levalet differs considerably from such figures is in the fact that he is not a stencil artist. But they contain less social commentary and therefore seem more playful. In terms of composition, his ideas are very similar to those of stencil artists such as Banksy or Blek le Rat. The paintings of Charles Leval, aka Levalet, are all about the human form and the various ways it interacts with its surroundings.
0 kommentar(er)
