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Drawing on the founding phenomena of a global popular culture, Invader has developed his own aesthetic and world geared to that universal language. But this artist does more than illustrate this overwhelming culture with his murals; he also critiques it by a material distancing of technology. He takes us on a poetic tour of our cities, weaving his art into a highly effective network. Forming an ensemble of hundreds of space invaders that watch us from out of the corners of their eyes, his work is not so far removed from Guy Debord’s notion of psychogeography, which Asger Jorn defined as the “science fiction of urban development.” These pixellated figures do not change the city, but bring turbulence to our reading of it and then recast its itineraries. They are like screens connecting us to his work, points of access to his world.

Each Space Invader is linked to the others as part of a series (each one is unique and has its own ID number) which covers the different phases of the invasion. But if each piece is autonomous, in the sense that it can, for a whole range of reasons, disappear, still it cannot exist on its own. Its meaning comes from its role in the invasion programme, itself a kind of articulated device with multiple inputs, a network pointing to the very heart of his work, constituted by invasion guides.

And what Invader’s work is about is indeed this model of the network. Not a network formed by several players, since for the time being he acts on his own as an artist, but a network existing in parallel to the “meta-network” that structures our changing information-driven society. Where Pop Art once shifted the notion of the artwork towards that of commodity by generalising mechanical reproduction, Invader puts forward the notion of dissemination as the nodal point of his work. He underscores the important transformation of our societies effected by information networks, while grounding his work in a material and human reality. He plays on the dematerialization of data by giving us work made using a time-honoured traditional technique.

Jean Marc Avrilla, 2005

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