Paris police cracked a stencil case in 1991 that had nothing to do with graffiti law. Someone had sprayed a copy of Caravaggio's Madonna and Child onto a city wall, and the technique matched a decade of rats crawling across Parisian facades. That's how officers finally put a name to the rats: Xavier Prou.
The rat that started it
Prou began stenciling in 1981 under the name Blek le Rat, according to Wikipedia. The name comes from a Belgian comic strip, Blek le Roc, with "rat" doubling as an anagram of "art." He'd seen New York graffiti firsthand on a trip in 1971 and decided the style didn't fit Paris. The city's classical stone architecture called for something smaller, faster, and more surgical than a full-color piece, so he picked a stencil.
He chose a rat because, in his words, it was "the only free animal in the city," one that "spreads the plague everywhere, just like street art," per the same account. He wanted an invasion. Rats breed, spread, and turn up somewhere new before anyone can stop them. That was the whole plan: paint one, then paint a hundred more, and let the city start seeing them everywhere on its own.
Twenty years ahead of everyone
By the time a young Bristol artist named Banksy started cutting his own stencils, Blek's rats had already been running across Paris for close to two decades. Banksy never hid the debt. "Every time I think I've painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well," he said. "Only twenty years earlier," according to MyArtBroker.
The same report traces the rat straight into Banksy's own catalog, from Radar Rat to Welcome to Hell, both dated 2004. Different rats, same argument underneath: the animal survives anything thrown at it, including whoever is trying to wipe it off a wall. Blek made that case first and kept making it for twenty years before anyone in London picked up a blade.
The arrest that ended the rats
The Caravaggio stencil is what got him identified in 1991, according to GraffitiStreet. After that, Blek stopped cutting stencils in place. He switched to pre-cutting full posters at home and pasting the finished piece to a wall in seconds, cutting his exposure on the street down to almost nothing. It was more work up front and far less risk in the moment, and it kept him out of a cell for the next decade of rats, soldiers, and self-portraits that followed.
Before Banksy, there was Blek
French outlets have spent years making the point the English-language press eventually caught up to: Blek was doing this before most of the scene had a name for it, according to The Connexion. He wasn't the first person to spray a wall in Paris. He was the first to build a career-length practice on one repeated image, which is the exact model half of contemporary street art now runs on: a single mark, dropped anywhere, that people recognize on sight whether it's a rat, a pixel invader, or a balloon-holding kid.
He's still working. In 2024 he opened "War & Peace" at Woodbury House in London, his first UK solo show in a decade, built around conflict and the post-war France he grew up in. He's shown in New York, restenciled old spots, and kept selling prints through galleries that didn't exist when he started.
What actually survives
Blek le Rat picked the rat because it survives anything thrown at it. Forty-five years later, the metaphor holds up better than most of the walls he painted on. The buildings get renovated, the stencils get buffed, and the rat keeps showing up somewhere else, on someone else's wall, cut by someone who has never heard the name Xavier Prou but is running his exact method anyway.
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