The French artist known as The Wa has spent over a decade working with one idea in mind, that of giving urban surfaces the same lightness of a child’s drawing. Behind a naive line, bold colours and almost infantile shapes lies a far more sophisticated critical strategy, designed to defuse the solemnity of whatever he paints.

His latest intervention, made for PFFFestival, confirms this signature style. Once again the artist turns an anonymous surface into something that looks like it came straight out of a school notebook, with the kind of compositional freedom only someone who hasn’t yet learned the rules of drawing can truly have. The result is a house that stands out within its urban surroundings, because it’s anything but boring, static or ordinary, so much so that it looks like a toy.

This isn’t the first time The Wa has played with this register. In 2021 he signed a series titled “A kid could do it“, made for a sequence of Atlantic Wall bunkers, the coastal fortifications built during the Second World War. The title is already a manifesto in itself, while the thanks to his mother add a personal touch to a work that turns symbols of war and surveillance into surfaces that look almost like a picture book.

This visual language comes straight out of graffiti and that drive to “make the capitals small”, to chip away at myths and conventions with a caustic humour that runs through his entire practice. Painting a facade or a bunker as if a child had done it means stripping the space it occupies of its authority and giving it back a playful, almost domestic character. The Wa’s coloured houses disarm rather than impress, and it’s in that apparent naivety that the most brilliant part of his work is hidden.