Blek le Rat: Ratical at Vertical Gallery, Chicago

Vertical Gallery opened in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village in 2013, on North Western Avenue, with a programme built around work that grew out of the street: graffiti, stencils, pop culture, illustration and graphic design. For its fourth birthday it has booked the artist with perhaps the strongest claim to having started the whole stencil strand of that story. Ratical, a solo show by Blek le Rat, opens on Saturday 1 April 2017 with the artist present and runs to 29 April. Remarkably, it is his first solo exhibition in Chicago.

The rats

Blek le Rat is Xavier Prou, born in 1951 in Boulogne-Billancourt on the western edge of Paris. He trained in fine art and architecture at the Beaux-Arts in Paris. A trip to New York in 1971 had shown him the first wave of subway graffiti, and it stayed with him, but when he began working on the streets of Paris a decade later he wanted something that suited the city’s older, more ornate architecture instead of a copy of the American letter styles.

His answer, from 1981, was the stencil and the image. He began spraying rats around Paris, lots of them, the idea being an infestation. The rat, he has said, was the one free animal in the city, and it gave him a way to be everywhere without writing a name. He has described that early work as having no politics to speak of; it was a way of standing out, and of pushing back against the anonymity of living in a very big city. The name has two sources. One is Blek le Roc, a comic he read as a child. The other is simple: rat is an anagram of art.

Over the 1980s the rats were joined by larger figures, life-size people stencilled at human scale, a development often traced to the Canadian artist Richard Hambleton’s shadowy painted figures. In 1991 the police caught him in the act while he was stencilling a copy of Caravaggio’s Madonna and Child, and afterwards he moved to posters prepared in advance and pasted up quickly, which cut the time spent exposed on the street. From 2006 he made a long series of images of homeless people, a subject he treats as a problem shared by every city he works in. The same year brought his first solo show in the UK, in London, and in 2008 Thames & Hudson published Getting Through the Walls, the first big book on his work.

The influence

Much of the reason Blek’s name comes up so often is who came after him. Banksy and Shepard Fairey are the two artists most often said to owe him a debt, and Banksy has admitted as much, joking that whenever he thinks he has painted something slightly original he discovers Blek did it twenty years before. The stencil, used to put an image rather than a name on a wall, spread from Paris across Europe and then to America, and a large part of what the public now thinks of as street art descends from that shift.

His exhibitions have taken him from Melbourne and Munich to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Milan, New York and London as well as Paris, and has painted in the streets of plenty more cities. His own explanation of what keeps him interested is surprise: the street offers a constant chance of being caught off guard, he has said, and he loses interest once anything becomes routine.

What is in the show

Ratical covers most of the ways he works away from the wall. There are spray-painted canvases and pieces on wood, with rats arranged in groups and runs across the grain. There are works on paper, and there is sculpture, including David with Kalashnikov, which puts a modern rifle in the hands of the classical hero.

For print collectors the show also brings new editions. The most local of them is a Chicago version of The Man Who Walks Through Walls, the besuited, bag-carrying figure who has become something like Blek’s self-portrait and who turns up striding past walls around the world. It is a three-colour screenprint on Arches paper, signed and numbered in an edition of 60. A second screenprint, I Resist (Venus de Milo), reworks a classical statue in the same spirit as the sculpture.

Seen together, the pieces show how little the core idea has changed in 36 years. A figure, cut cleanly and sprayed through a stencil, placed where you will come across it: on a Paris wall in 1981 or on a gallery wall in Chicago now, it is recognisably the same move.