Beast goes XXL with Céline, and the wall still wins
If you’ve been around street art long enough, you know the difference between someone who makes murals and someone who has actually built a practice in the street. Beast is firmly in the second camp.
Active since 2009, with more than 200 interventions across 40-plus cities, the Italian artist has been grinding away for close to two decades. Not chasing the mural-festival merry-go-round, not switching style every time Instagram does. In terms of sheer persistence, street-first attitude and refusal to become too polished, Beast belongs in the same long-haul conversation as names like Blu, Sten & Lex, Ericailcane or Ozmo — not because the work looks the same, but because these are artists who have spent years developing a language instead of just decorating walls.
His latest piece takes that language properly XXL. Completed in late August 2026 on a wrecked farmhouse outside Reggio Emilia, “Want Justice? Here Justice” is a roughly 15 × 6 metre paste-up of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Yes, Céline. Not Batman. Not Basquiat. Not another giant pair of photogenic eyes.
Beast has spent the last three years pasting writers, philosophers, artists and intellectual heavyweights onto abandoned architecture: Camus, Jung, Philip Roth, Pollock, Chomsky. It’s a seriously weird lane in contemporary street art, and that’s exactly why it works. The series is called “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”. Nobody fixes shit. Instead, Beast takes everything already broken about the wall and makes it part of the piece.
Old-school paste-up heads will appreciate how obsessive the process is. Beast photographs the exact surface first — every crack, stain, scar, busted bit of plaster. He then maps that texture digitally across the portrait, prints the whole monster onto paper, comes back with glue and starts matching the printed damage to the real damage underneath. Basically: registration hell at architectural scale. Anyone who has pasted even a couple of metres of paper
knows how quickly things go sideways. Now imagine doing it fifteen metres up, on a rotten farmhouse, while trying to make one crack line up with another crack. Good luck, mate.
The obvious references are there. JR proved how brutally effective gigantic photographic paste-ups can be when they hijack architecture. Ella & Pitr pushed pasted human figures into absurd, building-sized territory. But Beast is doing something different with the wall itself. He isn’t covering architecture. He’s sampling it. That’s the trick. Once installed, Céline doesn’t sit on the building like a poster. He looks infected by it. The plaster runs through his face. The decay belongs to both image and structure.
And choosing Céline makes things even messier — which is probably the point. One of the giants of twentieth-century literature, also a spectacularly difficult bastard with an indefensible antisemitic legacy. No easy hero worship here. Beast keeps dragging these dead cultural figures into forgotten places and asking the street to deal with them again. No permission. No audience guaranteed. No nice wall. Just paper, glue, history and ruins. After seventeen years, Beast still looks less interested in joining the street-art industry than in finding another completely knackered building and making life unnecessarily difficult for himself.
Instagram: @beastwalls
