Dince this morning, motorists entering Avignon no longer have before their eyes the mural fresco which has outraged Internet users around the world: carried out on a maintenance building, in a parking lot, it depicted a dark, immense Jacques Attali and disturbing, manipulating, like Geppetto, a small puppet by Emmanuel Macron-Pinocchio. The fresco, the work of graffiti artist Lekto, had already been partly smeared with blue paint last night by anonymous hands. Workers from a painting company definitively covered with white, Friday morning, the object of the scandal, at the request of the urban community of Greater Avignon, owner of the building.
The image, which circulated widely on social networks, provoked an avalanche of reactions, diametrically opposed. ” Wonderful ! », « Congratulations to the artist! », « the street art which opens the eyes, excellent! conspiratorial or far-right-linked accounts applauded. The legend of the fresco, “The beast 2 the event”, refers to a sentence pronounced by Emmanuel Macron in an interview with the FinancialTimes in 2020, and taken up in the conspiratorial sphere.
An elected official “overwhelmed by the eddies”
At first, the town hall of Avignon, directed by the socialist Cécile Helle, and the Agglo du Grand Avignon, chaired by a various right-wing elected representative, Joël Guin, mayor of the commune of Vedène, took refuge behind the “liberty of expression” of the artist. Faced with the outcry, and an urgent request, he said, from the prefecture, the president of the intermunicipal authority finally preferred to backtrack. “I am overwhelmed by the turmoil it generates”, recognizes the elected official on the antenna of the Israeli television I24News. If he had the fresco removed, it was, he said, because the graffiti artist “did not consult Mr. Attali”, who “has every right to attack this artist”.
The graffiti artist Lekto, close to the movements of Yellow Vests, had already produced other very political frescoes on this same wall: one representing an extraterrestrial-looking Olivier Véran with syringes in his back, another glorifying the Conspiratorial singer Francis Lalanne as a brave Gaul “Lalanix”. Another of his frescoes features the idol of antivax, Didier Raoult. Before his controversial caricature of Jacques Attali, the artist had painted, before the presidential election, a fresco to the glory of Coluche with the legend “for their fuck in the ass”. Many Internet users rejoiced this morning at the deletion of his latest work, which “stinks of anti-Semitism”. Others, just as numerous, cried out for the “single thought” or were indignant at seeing “France subjected to the Zionist dictatorship”.