Street art is first a cry. A breath born in the United States in the late 60s. Anonymous artists take walls as their canvas, spray cans as their brushes. Where some saw vandalism, they saw a necessity: reclaim urban space, give souls back to cities and make art accessible to all. Since then, street art has grown, diversified, conquered capitals worldwide... and of course, Bordeaux.
In our city, walls speak. They dress themselves in colors, shapes, messages, visual games. And you may have wondered: how are these works made? What are the tools, the techniques behind these murals, collages, stickers or huge black-and-white faces?
Here's an overview of the street art techniques you can find in the streets of Bordeaux.
Collage: simple on paper, technical in the street
You might think sticking a sheet on a wall is easy. But street artists will tell you the opposite.
Collage is above all the art of adapting a visual prepped in the studio to an irregular, living, shifting urban surface. You have to pick the right paper (not too porous, not too rigid), make a custom glue, and above all adapt the poster to every bump of the wall. The artist often has to work fast, at night, with precision and confidence.
"Collers" love life-size formats and strong, punchy, often committed visuals. Some Bordeaux collages last several weeks, others a few hours, but all have that little something ephemeral and alive.
Laceration: tear to reveal
With laceration, artists play street surgeons. They attack layers of stacked posters and, by scratching, tearing, cutting them, they bring out another image. It's the art of the visual mille-feuille.
A billboard becomes a creative field, where each cutter stroke tells a new story. What was mundane becomes unique. What was advertising becomes artistic.
In the streets of Bordeaux, some billboards have become favorite playgrounds for these image lacerators. Look closely: you might spot faces, shapes or messages, born from a simple tear.
Lettering: style in the letters
In street art, lettering is a discipline in its own right. Here, the artist becomes a "writer". They deform, twist, stylize letters to create a graphic universe of their own.
Every writer has their lettering style: sharp, fluid, explosive or minimalist. Lettering can be readable or coded, colored or black-and-white, but it's always an identity marker. Some Bordeaux writers are recognizable at first glance.
Get ready to look up. Sometimes it's up high, on a rooftop or a walkway, that words come to life.
Stencil: fast, precise, powerful
The stencil is one of the oldest, most iconic street art techniques. The idea? Cut a pattern into a rigid support, position it against a wall, then apply paint to let the shape appear.
What seems simple can become very complex: layering stencils to create effects of shadows, perspectives, depth. The stencil is often chosen for its speed of execution, very useful when the action is clandestine.
In Bordeaux streets, you'll often see portraits, slogans or symbols done with stencils. Eloquent, punchy, often political.
The sticker: small format, big impact
You see them everywhere. On signs, the backs of road signs, mailboxes, shop windows… The stickeris the stealth method par excellence.
🌊 Born in the United States, sticker art began with homemade stickers, slapped in series, to sign your passageor spread a message. Today, some Bordeaux artists have built a real visual identity from it.
You may notice some stickers barely stick to street furniture. That's on purpose! City halls sometimes add sand to paints to limit adhesion... but artists always find a trick.
Monumental street art: XXL and mind-blowing
Here, we're talking very (very) large format. Monumental street art shows on building gables, parking lots, bridges. It plays with volumes, perspectives, and sometimes optical illusions.
Artists who work this technique aren't afraid of heights or the void. They use cherry pickers, ropes or ladders to create murals visible from the other end of the neighborhood.
Mosaic: art pixel by pixel
Remember the video game Space Invaders? Thanks to it, mosaic reclaimed a place in contemporary street art.
This ancient technique, dating back to Antiquity, gets revisited by artists who stick small ceramic tiles on walls to create characters, objects or symbols. The aesthetic is pixelated, playful, but the work is meticulous and demanding.
You can spot them in Bordeaux if you keep your eyes open. Some are well hidden…
Street art in Bordeaux isn't a single way of doing things, but a multitude of techniques, talents, styles. Every artist has their preferences, methods, materials. Sometimes they blend, hybridize, evolve them.
And you, walking the city streets, become spectator to this diversity. So next time you cross a mural, a collage or a sticker... ask yourself how it was made. And most of all, take time to admire it.
Bordeaux is an open-air museum. And you're its privileged visitor.
