OakoAk is a French street artist from Saint-Étienne who makes cities funnier one small detail at a time. Instead of covering a wall with a mural, he looks for something that is already there, such as a crack, a bollard, a drain cover or a patch of peeling paint, and adds just enough to turn it into a character or a joke. Spider-Man swings from a crack in the plaster. A drain becomes the mouth of a whale. A stubby bollard gets a face and suddenly looks terrified of the traffic.
He has no formal art training and has described himself as a "pen pusher" with an office job, making his street work in his spare time. He began his interventions in 2006, and his pieces have since appeared across Saint-Étienne, in other French cities and abroad. He keeps his own identity out of the spotlight; as he told Huck magazine, "The most important thing is my work, not me."
Most of his pieces are painted on paper at home and pasted up outdoors, so many of them fade or disappear within months. The photos below, signed with his name, are often the only lasting record. Here are 32 of them, grouped by the kind of trick he plays.
Pop culture hiding in plain sight
The opening image combines two favourites. On the left, a tightrope walker with a pink parasol balances on a beaded line running out of the wall. On the right, Bruce Lee in his famous yellow jumpsuit lands a flying kick on a railing that really is bent, as though the kick did the damage. The joke depends entirely on the dent that was already there.
A long vertical crack becomes the thread of a web, and a small Spider-Man hangs upside down at the end of it. The piece is barely the size of a hand, so people walking past can easily miss it. That small scale is part of the pleasure of spotting his work.
Green pigs and a red bird from the mobile game Angry Birds are scattered around a doorway and window, using the ledges and corners of the facade as the game's level. The building becomes a playable screen. It is a typical example of how he borrows from the video games he grew up with.
A pair of green hands grips the edges of two garage doors that are already buckled, as if the Hulk had just torn them apart. The damage is real; the superhero explanation is the addition. It is one of his clearest examples of turning neglect into a story.
A curved iron post with a hooked top gets googly eyes and red lips, and suddenly looks like a long-nosed Muppet peering over the riverbank. The shape of the metal does most of the work. Two small additions are enough to give it a personality.
Calvin and Hobbes, the boy and tiger from Bill Watterson's comic strip, ride a sled down a stair handrail. Sledding scenes are a running theme in the original comic, so fans will recognise the reference instantly. The rail becomes a snowy slope without a drop of paint on the wall itself.
A thin stick figure stands with an apple balanced on his head, next to a pink door frame whose curve looks like a drawn bow. The reference is William Tell, the legendary Swiss marksman forced to shoot an apple off his son's head. The architecture supplies the weapon.
A concrete breeze block, with its holes standing in for eyes and mouth, becomes the face of the figure from Edvard Munch's painting The Scream. Below it, he painted the dark coat and hands of the famous figure. The rubble around it adds to the sense of despair.
A collapsed bench gets a simple sign: "Chuck Norris sat here." The piece plays on the internet jokes about the actor's supposedly superhuman strength. It is a pure caption joke, with the broken object doing the rest.
On a square-tiled pavement, numbers and little flags recreate a round of Minesweeper, the puzzle game that came with Microsoft Windows for many years. Each tile becomes a cell on the board. Anyone who has played it will catch themselves checking whether the numbers add up.
A bus shelter with a shattered glass panel carries a sign reading "Suzan Boyle sang here", a nod to the Scottish singer Susan Boyle, who became famous on Britain's Got Talent in 2009. The joke is the old cliché of a voice powerful enough to break glass. The misspelling is on the original sign.
Bollards, blocks and broken things with faces
Two low concrete bollards become a pair of characters: one stands looking alarmed, while the other lies knocked over with crossed-out eyes. A scene of minor road damage turns into a small tragedy. The faces are tiny, but the story is easy to read from a distance.
Here a bollard has been ripped half out of the ground, cracking the asphalt around it, and OakoAk has given it wide eyes and an open mouth. It looks as if it is screaming about what just happened. Many of his pieces respond to damage caused by cars and roadworks.
Two round manhole covers become eyes, a metal bollard becomes the nose, and a painted grin completes a face spread across the pavement. You only see it properly from above or from a few steps away. It is a large-scale example of the same face-finding instinct.
Another pair of worn concrete bollards gets attitude: one with an eye patch and a blade gripped in its grinning teeth like a pirate, the other sticking out its tongue. Moss and dirt on the concrete add to the scruffy look. They are some of his more mischievous characters.
A metal fence post driven into a hollow concrete block gets a comic red splash where they meet, as if the block had been stabbed. The cartoonish paint makes the joke obvious rather than gruesome. Temporary fences like this are everywhere on building sites.
A row of low concrete kerb blocks becomes a family of mice, each with ears and eyes painted on the rounded end. The repeated shapes make it look like a little procession heading into the bushes. It is a gentle piece placed in an easily overlooked corner.
A grey utility box standing on thin legs becomes a shark, with sharp teeth around its open front and gill slits on its side. The box already had the right boxy head shape. Seen from the side, it looks ready to bite passers-by.
A discarded piece of heavy machinery lying among pipes and debris gets an angry eye and a row of teeth. It now looks like a grumpy creature dumped on the street. The artist often works with what is left behind on building sites.
Cracks, stains and peeling paint
A tiny camel caravan walks along the ridge of a cracked concrete edge above a strip of grass, as if crossing desert dunes. The scale shift turns a few centimetres of wall into a landscape. It is one of his most understated pieces.
Peeling paint on a pale wall becomes a cloud of smoke rising from a black factory silhouette painted below it. The shape of the damage looks exactly like pollution drifting across the sky. Saint-Étienne's industrial past makes the image especially fitting.
A patch of exposed brick where the plaster has fallen away takes the outline of a seal, and a red ball painted above its nose completes the circus act. The shape was already in the wall; he only had to notice it. It is a textbook example of his approach.
A stencilled "I love YOU" uses a heart-shaped hole in the pavement for the heart. The worn surface becomes a love note. It costs almost nothing to make, but people stop to photograph it.
A stick-figure golfer stands on the kerb with a faint arc showing the flight of his ball. The kerb becomes the fairway and the street the rough. A thin pencil-like line is enough to suggest movement.
A round metal cover set in the pavement becomes the shell of a yellow snail with eyes on stalks. The spiral on the metal matches the shell perfectly. It is one of his best-known pieces and a good one to try copying with chalk.
A white whale is painted around a storm drain so that the grate becomes its mouth, like the baleen plates a real whale uses to filter food. The road markings above it look like the pointed fins of other sea creatures. A small blue spout sits on its back.
A giant paint roller seems to be laying down a crossing in bright green, with the stripes trailing behind it. In fact the green marks are an addition to an ordinary street. It plays with the idea that the city is being painted as we watch.
Two stick figures appear to be carrying away the doors of an electrical cabinet, while another runs off down the wall. The cabinets suddenly look like furniture being moved. It is a small comedy of urban maintenance.
Jokes with a message
A small sign reading "Freedom here" is fixed to a wall between two security cameras. No paint is needed; the irony comes from the placement. It is one of his more pointed comments on surveillance in public space.
On a Paris footbridge covered with love locks, apparently the Pont des Arts, a red emergency box reads "In case of broken love break the glass", with bolt cutters inside. The weight of padlocks became a real problem on the bridge, and the city later removed the lock-covered panels. The piece manages to be both romantic and sceptical.
A blue pedestrian crossing sign gets a flying saucer above the walking figure, as if he is being beamed up. The official pictogram becomes a science-fiction scene. Road signs are among his favourite surfaces because everyone knows exactly what they normally mean.
A pink, sprinkle-covered doughnut swim ring sits on a riverside quay that appears to be in Gateshead, in north-east England, with the curved Sage Gateshead building behind it. The bright inflatable looks absurdly out of place on the grey stone. It is a reminder that he also works when travelling.
How OakoAk's interventions work
Across all these pieces, the method is the same: walk, look and wait for a shape to suggest something. In an interview with Street Art United States he explained, "I like to use the street as a big canvas and to play with the imperfections of the streets, and the walls." He cites football, comics, video games and his home town as influences, which explains the steady stream of cartoon and game references.
Because the location is part of the artwork, the pieces cannot simply be moved. A Spider-Man without the crack, or a seal without the patch of brick, would lose its point. That also means most of them are temporary: paper weathers, councils clean walls and broken bollards get replaced. Like much street art, his work is generally made without official permission, so it lives with the risk of being removed at any time.
Seeing your own street differently
The lasting effect of OakoAk's work is that it trains your eye. After looking at a few of his pieces, it is hard not to see faces in bollards or animals in cracks on your own walk to work. That instinct, known as pareidolia, is something everyone shares; he simply acts on it with a brush and a sense of humour.
If you want to explore more, his official site, oakoak.fr, collects pieces from Saint-Étienne and his travels, often with titles, places and dates. And if you feel like trying it yourself, chalk on a pavement is a harmless place to start.
Sources: All artworks and photographs by OakoAk (oakoak.fr); Huck: OaKoAK, the smartest street artist on the block; Street Art United States: Interview with Oakoak.
COMMENTS