Some of France’s major cities have something in common: giant colorful faces watching passersby. They’re the murals of Alber, a French street artist born in 1986, known on Instagram as @alber_oner, who for more than twenty years has been inhabiting city walls with faces impossible not to see.

Alber first approached graffiti in the early 2000s, and that street soul hasn’t left him even now, especially when it comes to choosing the spaces where his art gets to live. Alber doesn’t paint on neutral surfaces: he paints on concrete worn down by salt water, on the inside of a rusted freight car, on the side of a harbor breakwater, on a bare brick wall. He picks places that already have a history, and layers a new presence over them, one that doesn’t erase the surface but inhabits it, turning it into a frame.

The subjects are almost always faces (or glimpses of them), marked by bright, vivid colors. Yellows, pinks, turquoises, purples, Alber’s palette is never random, nor purely decorative. It’s an integral part of the structure, the way a shape comes to make sense.

And so his faces live everywhere: they emerge from cracks in walls, appear on doors and windows, even float on water, carried by the current. Either way, they’re designed to be seen up close and admired from a distance, becoming part of the context around them.

In the end, what stays with you is the feeling of being watched, of never quite being alone. From a freight car stopped on a dead-end track, from a wall on the outskirts of town, from the concrete of a harbor no longer in use. Alber puts eyes where you don’t expect them, and from there, they never stop following you.