“If you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved, then the rat is the ultimate role model.”
—BanksyIn many ways, the rat exemplifies the spirit of street art: both are vilified, considered capable of compromising the fabric of ordered society, and, despite repeated efforts to eradicate them, are extremely prolific. Like the rat, street artists are also at the margins, often active at night to avoid detection, whilst also inhabiting a central place within the urban everyday.
Banksy’s Love Rat features the animal brandishing a large paintbrush, having just finished painting a red heart. Dripping profusely, the heart is reminiscent of street art’s execution, where an artist might leave a work wet or unfinished to escape arrest. Similarly, the rat is a stencil, another popular graffiti technique which allows one to complete even large-scale works rapidly. Constantly casting a polemic eye on modern society and what the artist views as its many shortcomings, Banksy has commented that “if you are dirty, insignificant, and unloved, then the rat is the ultimate role model.”
From an art historical perspective, the rat is considered a symbol of decay, disease and corruption, further reinforced by the animal’s tendency to consume human refuse. Preferring to live closer to densely populated cities for this reason, rats are tied to our existence and may even be seen, despite our collective repulsion, as reflections of ourselves. In Love Rat, Banksy exploits this fundamental insecurity. By anthropomorphising and representing animals often derided by humans, such as rats, monkeys, and urban foxes, the artist forces us to realise that, as animals ourselves, we too are capable of being disgusting, insignificant and spurned.
Crediting his predecessor and “Father of Stencil Art” Blek le Rat, who began tagging stencils of rats across Paris in the early 1980s, as one of his main sources of inspiration, Banksy has returned to this iconography throughout his oeuvre. For instance, at the height of the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom, the artist tagged a group of rats on the London Underground. As one sneezed and contaminated the carriage, the others playfully used surgical masks as parachutes. During a similar period, Banksy completed a new work which featured a group of rats, stencilled on the wall, running rampant and wreaking havoc in his bathroom. The caption of the image posted on his official Instagram humorously read “My wife hates it when I work from home.”
