Like an onion, Petit Agité’s work has layers – sometimes several dozen. The street artist’s intricate detail and commitment to his art is that of someone who has long honed their craft, but in fact he’s a relative newcomer, only starting to hit the streets of Berlin in 2021. Now, the stencil and paste-up artist is an integral part of the scene; his work has popped up in Portugal, Dublin, Warsaw, Prague, Bucharest, Sicily, Athens, Naples, Austria, and Sweden.
Petit Agité is also one of the organisers of Berlin PasteUP, which had its first edition in September. The three-day festival attracted graffiti and paste-up artists from across the world, and many others who couldn’t make it in person sent in stickers and stencils via post to be proxy-pasted on Berlin’s streets. The community celebration was “just the start”, he says – they plan to continue this autumn with more group painting and pasting.
Where does your name come from? Do people assume that you’re a woman because of it?
Yes, all the time! Many people know the word ‘petit’, meaning “small”. It is a [term] usually used for small women, but that’s petite, with an ‘e’ at the end. Petit is the masculine form, that’s why I’m Petit Agité. It means “the little one who never calms down”. It’s an 80s punk rock song from France. My first language is French, I grew up bilingual all over France and Germany.
Did art play a role in your life before you got into this particular genre?
My artistic education ended when I left school. That was a while ago. After that, I was very interested in art and looked at contemporary art often. Then I developed another passion for urbex and lost places. I’ve spent the last 10 years travelling to a lot of abandoned places.
That’s how I got in touch with street art and started taking street art photos in lost places and here in the city. So first I was a spotter, and I often went to one of these lost places with my son on the weekends, and at some point he picked up the cans and started writing on the wall.
I thought that’s great, and I bought him four cans and told him we could go out more often. We did that three, four, five times, and then the fun was over for him and I had these cans. And then I thought, what am I going to do with the cans? I started cutting and spraying, playing around. And when I’m doing something I like doing it properly, so I made quite a lot of progress in quite a short amount of time and made more and more complicated motifs.
Many of your pieces are art nouveau. That’s a very complicated style…
What counts is how complex you build up the image. You can also make really nice, simple pictures with one layer and you’ll make your mark on the wall, but you don’t have a 3D effect and a [nuanced] colour like that. Most of the stencils I do now have between 10 and 25 layers. I’m forever cutting things and then I can make large motifs. The biggest thing I’ve done so far is two square metres.
Do you make any money doing street art?
Nope. I work in management for the social enterprise My Way, mostly with homeless people. So, very different. Sometimes people reach out saying, “I’d like to have a picture of yours.” I only do originals, so an A3 picture costs €120. And then most people don’t want it anymore because they think, oh well, I can somehow get it for €30, €40.
How do you find the time to do art next to a full-time job?
I don’t sleep that much and the things I do, I always do with concentration. My children are already quite big. I have quite a lot of energy. I like doing things. Yesterday morning, for example, I sprayed for an hour before going to work and then after work again, because I had a new idea.
I have had a studio for six months now. I’m there a lot, because then I can spray in peace, even in winter. Last November, I made a fire on my terrace so I could spray there. Then I was so cold that I thought, this is actually crazy. I spend so much time doing this and it’s so much fun, so I rented a studio.
What do you want people to take away from your art?
I usually try to create positive motifs. People are usually stressed by everyday life, and if I enable them to see something different, it’s enough for me to know that they had a brightening moment with a picture that I made. So that’s one story, and the other, which I would like to do more of, is to send political messages. With Berlin PasteUP our motto is “We smash borders together” because we feel that this ever-increasing division of society, this polarisation, simply leads to hostility, which harms many people.
Tell us about the inaugural Berlin PasteUP…
The three days were incredibly intense and full of new encounters and creativity. It was great fun. We had visitors from Italy, France, Greece, Austria, the Netherlands and Romania, both for painting and pasting. We stuck and sprayed in different places and had fun improvising.
What’s the hardest part of doing street art?
Some parts of the population don’t understand that it’s a positive thing – there are people who destroy art, deliberately. There are also boundaries between people who do graffiti and street art. My ambition is that we can actually create this kind of coexistence. My aim is to break that down a bit.
- Keep up with Petit Agité’s work on Instagram.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
