"The global ambitions of Invader’s street art."

 

New Yorker - "Watch This Space"
By Lauren Collins

"His work transposes these generationally primordial references from the screen to the street, merging geek aesthetics with urban heroics. “Invader’s first innovation was in not writing letters,” the gallerist and curator Magda Danysz told me. “He took the graffiti way of doing things, but suddenly he was putting up an image.”

Invader first laid siege to Paris, mounting a hundred and forty-seven pieces in 1998 alone. Some of these still exist, presiding over the Pont d’Iéna tunnel or blending into the stone of the fountain at Châtelet. (Invader says that the mosaic near the Fontaine des Innocents, at Les Halles, is the all-time most flashed creation on his app.) Others live on only in photographs—a scarlet alien surveying a student protest from the République monument, like a benevolent ancestor of CCTV. “When I put something in the Métro, more people see it than if it were in the Louvre,” Invader told me, paraphrasing Keith Haring. (Invader actually did sneak ten pieces into the museum at one point, saying that this made him the only living artist on display.)"

Previously,
Invader - Africa (Jan. 2015)
Invader - Pink Panther (Feb. 2013)
Street Art in Brooklyn (Jul. 2011)