PARIS — The mysterious French street artist known only as “Invader” has struck Paris again, this time to celebrate the Olympics.
Since the 1990s, Invader has been sticking his offbeat mosaics on the walls of Paris, usually at night and without permission. He has become the most international, invasive and intriguing contemporary street artist in France. His works are scattered throughout the City of Lights and his fans have a lot of fun tracking them down.
And now there’s a new Olympic-themed one for them to discover.
Invader stuck it on a wall on one of the banks of the Seine between Tuesday and Wednesday. Using tiles to create the mosaic, it shows one of its iconic Space Invader figures running. The colors of the work evoke the shades of blue that the organizers of the Paris Games used to decorate the city for the Olympics.
A representative for the artist, who like him asked not to be named, told The Associated Press in an email: “Invader told me to say he wanted to celebrate the Paris Olympics with this mosaic. The space invader is running and he’s wearing some of the colors of the Olympics signage.”
Fans of the artist can download his app, called “Flash Invaders,” and then use it to take photos of any of his works they find.
When they do, the app awards them points. The more artworks they find and “flash” them, the more points they get.
It’s addictive: the app has nearly 400,000 players.
The new mosaic is the 1,512th that Invader has stuck in Paris. Players get 50 points when they flash it with his app. Since the first catalogued mosaic of a blue Space Invader was placed on a Paris street in 1998, numbered PA_01, Invader has colonized the world. There are now more than 4,000 of his mosaics in cities and towns on every continent except Antarctica.
On Instagram on Wednesday, the artist posted a photo of his new work accompanied by the words “Special Olympics Games Paris 2024”, with a jogger running past.
This and a video post from the artist alerted fans that there was a new work to discover.
A small group of them quickly found it, took a picture of it with the app, got their points and spent some time together admiring the work.
André Lavigne, a 64-year-old retired chemical engineer, was one of the first to find and flash it. He is currently ranked among the top 100 players on the app, having found 2,718 of the artist’s works in France and abroad.
From the very first hours, the work has already generated buzz.
“I’ve had a lot of people come up and ask, ‘Is this a new one?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it was installed last night.’ (They say) ‘Oh, well, that’s amazing,’” Lavigne said.
Another fan, Gema Calero, arrived on her bike and celebrated with a raised fist when she got her 50 points.
“It’s fresh, it still smells of glue,” she said.
She says that looking for these works all over Paris taught her a lot about the city and the importance of looking around.
“It allows you to look at life differently. You look around you. You look up a little. Because normally, when you walk, you look at what’s in front of you,” she says. “It’s great.”
Like Banksy, the British street artist to whom he is sometimes compared, Invader is elusive, fiercely protective of his anonymity and operating on the fringes of illegality. He appears, pastes and disappears in the night, leaving behind his characteristic pixelated mosaics, made mainly of small ceramic and glass tiles.
Most resemble the aliens from the arcade game Space Invaders. Others are wonderfully elaborate, like the still lifes of fruit or, in New York, the portraits of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. Some reference pop culture—Spiderman, Star Wars, Bugs Bunny, the Ninja Turtles, pizza, and so on.
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AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/paris-olympics-2024
