Time.news – It’s called “Invader”, invader, and is an artist who rose to fame in the French capital for having affixed a mosaic of a Martian from the pioneering 1978 video game to a wall Space Invaders.
“It all started along a narrow cobblestone street near the Place de la Bastille,” writes the New York Times, but “in one year he had already hung 146 more from monuments, bridges and sidewalks.” His technique is “to use square bathroom tiles that looked like pixels.”
He was cementing a mosaic on the wall of a church when the police arrested him for the first time while he was not caught “when he got stuck inside the Louvre”, underlines the newspaper, which specifies: “A quarter of a century later, it’s hard to walk a block of Paris without encountering a mosaic of Invaders.”.
The city is full of them. In short, “Invader’s work has become an essential part of the Parisian aesthetici” writes the newspaper, to the point of becoming one with the life of the people in the neighborhoods, so much so that many citizens “have set up teams of volunteers to repair the damaged ones and replace the stolen ones while there are those who plan their weekends and holidays to go find them”.
His work is still “technically illegal” and the fear of being arrested causes him to use the pseudonym, even though the Hotel de Ville, the town hall of Paris, has showcased the artist’s work on the poster which advertises its own review that celebrates street art. Invader quips and wonders: “What will happen the next time the police stop me on the street at 4 in the morning?” After spending 10 nights in prison in Paris for vandalism without actually ever being formally charged, “they will ask for a my autograph or will they arrest me?”
Many adore the artist’s original thesis which offers the viewer both a nostalgic sense of life and an eerie foresight about the facts. To date, Invader has installed more than 4,000 pieces in 32 countries, including around 1,500 of these in Paris alone. “Who best embodies the sense of Paris?” declared Nicolas Laugero Lasserre, street art expert and one of the four curators of the exhibition proposed by the town hall.
The American newspaper writes: the artist “grew up in a Paris suburb with a darkroom at home and graduated from the famous École des Beaux-Arts. He is ‘close to 50’. He is a swimmer and a vegetarian, the only motivation he has added to his work. He sells copies of his mosaics at exhibitions and auctions and publishes books himself. Over the years his cultural and historical references have expanded. In Paris, some of these works seem like a joke, others like a love song”.
On the Rue de Louvre, the Mona Lisa from Invader hangs next to the electric green sign of the Duluc detective agency, a reference to when the painting was stolen in 1911.