PARIS (AP) — The mysterious French street artist known only as “Invader” has visited Paris again, this time to celebrate the Olympic Games.
Invader has been plastering his idiosyncratic mosaics on the walls of Paris since the 1990s, mostly at night and without permission. He has become France’s most international, invasive and intriguing contemporary street artist. His works can be found all over the City of Light, and his fans take great pleasure in tracking them down.
And now there’s a new one, with an Olympic theme for them to find.
Invader cemented it to a wall on one of the banks of the Seine sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday. Using tiles to create the mosaic, it shows one of his signature Space Invader figures running. The work’s colors evoke the shades of blue that the Paris Games organizers used to decorate the city for the Olympics.
A representative for the artist — who, like him, wishes to remain anonymous — told The Associated Press in an email that “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 Olympic plates.”
Admirers of the artist can download his app, called “Flash Invaders,” and then use it to take photos of his works they come across.
When they do, the app awards them points. The more works they find and ‘flash’, 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 pasted in Paris. Players earn 50 points for showing it with his app. Since the first catalogued mosaic of a blue Space Invader was placed on a street in Paris 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 the new work and the words “Special Olympic Games Paris 2024,” showing a jogger running past.
That and a video message from the artist alerted admirers that there was a new work for them to discover.
A small group quickly found it, took a picture of it with the app, received points and spent time together admiring the work.
Superfan André Lavigne, a 64-year-old retired chemical engineer, was one of the first to find and show it off. He is currently in the app’s top 100 players, having tracked down 2,718 of the artist’s works in France and abroad.
Already in the first few hours there was a lot of interest in the work.
“I’ve had a lot of people come up and flash and ask, ‘Is it a new one?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, that was put up last night.’ (They say) ‘Oh, well, that’s extraordinary,’” Lavigne said.
Another admirer, Gema Calero, rode up on her bike and celebrated with a fist pump when she reached her 50 points.
“It’s all fresh, but it still smells like glue,” she said.
She says that by searching for the artworks all over Paris, she learned a lot about the city and the value of looking around.
“It makes you look at life differently. You hunt around. You look up a little bit. Because normally when we walk, we look at what’s in front of us,” she said. “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 edge of illegality. He arrives, pastes and disappears into the night, leaving behind his trademark 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 still lifes of fruit or, in New York, portraits of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. Some reference pop culture — Spiderman, Star Wars, Bugs Bunny, Ninja Turtles, pizza and the like.
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AP Olympic Games: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games