Blek Le Rat is the originator of modern stencil graffiti art.  Without him, there would be no Bansky. There would be no Shepard Fairy. And there sure as shittake wouldn't be little art punk kid stenciling devil horns on Cameron Diaz movie posters as we speak. That's why we wanted to pay homage to Blek, the man whose graffiti changed the face of contemporary street art and the way we see the brick and concrete walls of our urban jungle.

Blek Le Rat is the originator of modern stencil graffiti art.  Without him, there would be no Bansky. There would be no Shepard Fairy. And there sure as shittake wouldn't be little art punk kid stenciling devil horns on Cameron Diaz movie posters as we speak. That's why we wanted to pay homage to Blek, the man whose graffiti changed the face of contemporary street art and the way we see the brick and concrete walls of our urban jungle.

Why? Because nothing drops panties and tighty whitey boxer briefs faster than talking about street artists obscure to the general populace. Mmm, intelligence.

First off, let's start off with his ever-so-endearing name. Blek Le Rat. Where the fuck does that come from?

Well, taking his name from the French comic book Blek le Roc, he used "rat" as an anagram for "art."

"The rat is the only free animal in the city," he explained. "Rats spread the plague everywhere, just like street art.” Deep cuts right there.

Blek Le Rat got his start spraying the image of rats on walls back in 1981, choosing to keep his identity secret as to remove any source of personal identity from his art. That made more of a public sentiment than a personal one, something stencil graffiti follow-up acts like Bansky and Fairey have championed.

He's credited as the first street artist to use stencils to portray human forms instead of lettering, a concept that changed the context of street art at the time by bringing innate emotion and cultural references to the streets where it could be digested by everyone from the billionaires to identity-less vagrants and runaways. In that sense, Blek's art made graffiti democratic and equalizing, which was novel during a time when street art was considered by many to be a vulgar act of urban fuckery.

Ten years later, his real identity was revealed after he was charged and fined for graffiti-ing his own version of Caravaggio's Madonna and Child onto a wall in Paris, and he was ousted as Xavier Prou. But the deflowering of his anonyminity didn't stop him from creating, inventing new types of graffiti in the wake of his arrest.

Since then, the godfather of stencil graffiti himself has popularized another unique concept in street art: making mutated hybrids of iconic classic and pop art. Appropriating work from artists like Salvador Dalí to Leonardo da Vinci, Blek lifts historical works from their traditional setting and transplants them into grotesque or forgotten urban landscapes where they should never belong … but inexplicably do.

Using the cut-and-paste technique of Dada-era collages and the sourcing of commercial pop art imagery, Blek combines cultural references and Old Master artworks his stencils and graphic spray paint works. Some prime examples of this occur in his take on Dutch master Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, where he replaces the iconic apple that Eve extends to Adam with an Andy Warhol-style banana, or in his spray-painted version of da Vinci’s The Last Supper, in which he replaces Jesus with himself, sitting pretty at the head of the table. Although our favorite might be his version of Michelangelo's David, who Blek outfits with a machine gun. Take whatever meaning you want from that, but we're personally hoping it's to scare people away from making fun of his tiny peen.

Hugely influential on today’s graffiti artists, his counter-iconography continues to transverse time periods, media, and styles while still paying tribute to the iconic works and masters he uses in his work.

“As an artist I do not think that we truly invent anything at this point.” Blek has said. “It does not exist anymore. It is just how you do it that makes it different than others.”

Okay, so now that you know that, let's look at his stuff, yas?

Blek Le Rat‘s stencils distill the essence of the human struggle into poetically concise images. Blek shows clarity in his work, he makes every stylized mark count, yielding art that is at once personal and universal, economical in gesture, and bountiful in statement.
—Shepard Fairey

Artsy has a great article about Blek Le Rat's marriage of pop culture and classic art … check it out here.