Le retour du refoulé

The paintings of Charles Leval, aka Levalet, are all about the human form and the various ways it interacts with its surroundings. In terms of composition, his ideas are very similar to those of stencil artists such as Banksy or Blek le Rat. But they contain less social commentary and therefore seem more playful. Where Levalet differs considerably from such figures is in the fact that he is not a stencil artist. His highly realistic black and white figures have all been applied to paper by hand, and then pasted onto surfaces. This meticulous manual aspect sets his works apart in the crowded world of street art. Le retour du refoulé (The Return of the Repressed) is both the title of Levalet’s in situ work at the Völklingen Ironworks World Cultural Heritage Site, and a psychoanalytical term coined by Sigmund Freud. Like repressed experiences or feelings that suddenly shoot back into consciousness, the crows seem to haunt the disembodied worker in a Hitchcock-like manner.

Daniel Bauer / Robert Kaltenhäuser