Month: December 2023

For twenty-seven years, Invader has been decorating the walls, bridges, monuments, tunnels, sidewalks, staircases, railings, gates, curbs, benches, bollards, posts, poles, pipes, columns, fountains, pools, docks, seawalls, roofs, chimneys, medians, bus stops, train stations, storefronts, bookshops, and bars of Paris and beyond with playful mosaics. They have depicted everything from winged insects to cartoon characters and slot-machine fruits. Invader calls his interventions “invasions,” and the mosaics themselves are known as “invaders.” He has executed more than four thousand in a hundred and seventy-two cities in thirty-two countries, grazing permanence in the traditionally ephemeral world of street art.

When he wasn’t racing in circles, he was daydreaming. All his life, thoughts, feelings and sensory information have coursed through him at gale force. His attention is perpetually whipsawing elsewhere or vaporizing entirely. He will say, over dinner, “I’m sorry, but the clavinet took me completely out of the conversation,” when a clavinet suddenly enters the restaurant’s background music. He will say — laughing at himself, after you ask about his difficulty concentrating — “You’re not going to believe this, but ask me again because my mind wandered in the middle of the question.”