Invader: The artist who attended tiling school on Mars
Street artists were once widely regarded as public nuisances rather than purveyors of a valid, new strain of creative practice. Now, a greater number than ever before can legitimately claim to have secured their places in the public’s affection — none more so than the masked Frenchman known as Invader — or Space Invader in some quarters.
How the street artist became much-loved
The reasons for the (almost) widespread adoration for the 1969-born former student of the École des Beaux-Arts (although he tells interviewers he attended a tiling school on Mars) can’t exactly be grounded in easy recognisability — after all, he has never outed his identity or shown his face — but is, instead, a result of his actual artwork. Invader’s works largely depicts familiar video game characters from the 8-bit era of the late ’70s and early ’80s, composed of square ceramic tiles, each meant to represent one pixel.
This ‘simple’ method has proved quite the effective one for the man who calls his artworks “invasions”, and indeed, even his name references the iconic 1978 arcade game. What such an easily repeatable approach is not the product of, is laziness on the part of an artist who has shown incredible fastidiousness in his preparation for, and subsequent creation of, “invasions” in cities across the world, including…
