France's capital – particularly in the east – is awash with ever-changing graffiti, more so now than ever before. Helen Elfer heads to the city of lights to meet an artistic knight and take an illuminating city tour
He’s seen me before I’ve seen him: the glowering, heavily-browed eyes of wrestler André the Giant stare down from the wall top.
This black-and-white stencil, designed by Shepard Fairey, is part of the decades-old ‘OBEY’ street-art campaign, one of thousands of identical stickers and posters that have been plastered across the globe in recent years.
I’m gazing back up at this particular iconic face from the run-down streets of the Belleville neighbourhood in east Paris. Belleville is one of the city’s edgiest districts. Traditionally a working-class area, it has become a haven for musicians and artists who can afford the cheaper rent. Being here makes me feel as though I’m standing in the middle of an open-air gallery, because there’s street art everywhere I look – from sophisticated brushworks to wheat-pasted posters and spray-painted tags coating countless walls.
As Demian Smith, of Underground Paris, puts it: “It’s like Brick Lane 15 years ago: gritty, creative, up-and-coming, and still unspoilt by bobos [bourgeois bohème]." Smith, a one-time graffiti artist and the unofficial docent of Belleville, is taking me and a small group on a tour of the area. Leaving André behind, we stroll up Rue Oberkampf, snapping pictures of pieces by some of the scene’s other big hitters. Tiny tile mosaics inspired by the retro video game Space Invaders brighten up the odd concrete corner – there are thousands of these cheeky, practically indestructible characters daubed across the capital. A winking, pouting girl, thumbs hooked saucily in the band of her pants, is roughly sketched on one wall. Across another stretches an enormous beast with paws, a beak, eyes and a snout, delicately brush-painted by Italian artist Never2501.
We stop at Avenue Jean Aicard to examine posters of four solemn black-and-white figures, their electric red lips the only lick of colour. The clean lines of the drawings contrast with the disintegrating posters’ edges, giving them a beautifully fragile, ephemeral appearance.
“The characters represent chivalry, love and positivity” says Demian. They’re the work of artist Fred le Chevalier, whose style has captured the attention of the Paris art world. A prolific worker, he has pasted thousands of pictures around the city’s streets and, more recently, has been holding gallery-based shows too.
If the old cliché of Paris as the city of love needed updating, then Fred le Chevalier (meaning ‘Fred the Knight’, a suitably romantic pseudonym) is certainly the man to do it. He began pasting drawings up as ‘gift’ for a woman he had fallen head over heels for, leaving them to surprise her in places where he knew she would see them as she went about her daily routine.
“At the beginning I was only drawing one character, my ‘alter ego’ with a sweet message,” Fred tells me in an email. “Life is hard, life can be dark but there’s a will to go on, find the light. I always try to put feelings in my drawings, feelings connected to characters who are women or men, most times androgynous, not adults, not children, so everyone can relate to them. I am connected with the usual themes – life, death, love, hope, despair – and try to represent them in a sweet way.”
Many of Fred’s images look as innocent as they would if they’d been lifted from the pages of a children’s story book. It seems as though the characters are in the middle of a fantastical adventure – carried along by a pinwheel, riding a flying horse, held by a bear or sharing a cute kiss.
“Sometimes there is a story, but I am more interested in letting people create their own stories than to trap them into mine,” he continues. “It's always very exciting to put up a new one. I feel different when it's something new, but I feel happy each time I go out with my paper, each time I draw something new.”
He says he finds this part of town a natural home for his art. “I’ve lived in Ménilmontant, close to Belleville, for a year. I choose to live here because this place is full of life, with many different people – black, white, Chinese, rich, poor. It's a quiet place without the tension you can feel sometimes in Paris where everyone rushes, so it's a very appropriate place for my paper characters.”
In keeping with his gentle style, Fred is no clandestine stick-and-dash-by-night artist, preferring to take his time pasting up in broad daylight. Despite the fact that his work is technically illegal, he rarely runs in to any trouble. Many Parisians have a real soft spot for street art and even the Mairie de Paris, despite regularly clearing some of it, is actively supportive of urban culture. In fact, Belleville’s street art pièce de résistance, Le MUR project, is funded by the mairie. The large billboard on Rue Oberkampf was once used by high-profile multinationals for advertising but – to their fury – the tempting canvas was constantly being covered in graffiti.
Rather than launching a crackdown, the mairie resolved the issue in 2007 by buying it outright and now, every fortnight, the Le MUR project invites a new street artist to cover it with their work. “To be chosen is considered a great honour,” says Smith.
However, it’s at Rue Dénoyez that the street art activity reaches fever pitch. Every inch of every wall, window frame and metal shutter is covered in paint and posters; even the plant pots have faces painted on the sides. Studios line this narrow lane, with doors wide open and artists busy inside, while outside a couple of kids are practising with spray cans. They’re watched fondly by their parents, who are drinking wine on the sunny pavement terrace of Café Aux Folies, a favourite haunt of singer Édith Piaf in the 1960s. It’s a completely unpretentious scene, and Demian says: “It’s still unaware of itself: a young set drink here, but no one is posing.”
We wrap up our tour here, but I return the following afternoon to take more pictures and am staggered to find that it’s a completely new sight already. The wall the kids were tagging has been covered over by a huge Lichtenstein-esque painting of a couple locked in a dramatic kiss (a French kiss, naturally: their swirling tongues are the centre of the piece).
It’s a fitting reminder of how transient street art in the French capital really is. This fast-paced, surreal, captivating world grabs your attention and forces you to appreciate it the moment you see it, as tomorrow it’ll be gone – disintegrated, faded, taken down by the authorities or buried underneath someone else’s new work. You could call it a case of street art imitating life.
All images from Underground Paris
