There is something profoundly countercultural in Beast’s recent work, although not in the usual sense of the word. It is not countercultural because it is illegal, because it takes place outside institutions, or because it belongs, at least technically, to the vocabulary of street art. Its real act of resistance lies elsewhere: it asks us to remember. That demand may sound modest.
Today it is almost radical.
With “Want Justice? Here Justice”, completed in late August 2026 on an abandoned farmhouse near Reggio Emilia, Beast has installed an approximately fifteen-by-six-metre portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline across a decaying rural façade. It is the largest work to date in his ongoing series “… and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”, a project in which figures from twentieth-century literature, philosophy, art and intellectual history are made to emerge from neglected architecture. The word emerge matters.
Beast does not simply place an image upon a wall. He begins with the wall itself, photographing its cracks, stains, abrasions and erosion. These physical traces are digitally transferred onto the chosen portrait. The image is then printed at monumental scale and returned to precisely the architecture from which its texture originated, the printed fractures painstakingly aligned with the real ones beneath. The result is extraordinarily effective. One does not quite see Céline on the farmhouse. One has the unsettling impression that Céline is sweating through it. And herein lies the conceptual strength of Beast’s practice. These figures are ghosts, but not dead ones.
© Beast
Much of what we say, fear, argue about, desire and diagnose in ourselves was already articulated, often with considerably greater precision, by people whose books now sit unopened while we spend our hours sliding a thumb across illuminated glass. We mistake novelty for progress.
Our age possesses an astonishing capacity to distribute information and an equally astonishing inability to remain with it. We live as though seven seconds of attention were already a considerable investment. The image arrives, produces its tiny neurological reward and vanishes beneath the next image. War, advertising, grief, pornography, politics, somebody’s breakfast and the collapse of a government occupy identical rectangles and are dismissed with identical gestures. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. In such an environment, attention itself becomes an ethical act.
© Beast
Beast’s work asks for precisely what contemporary culture is designed to prevent: duration, historical consciousness, concentration. His enormous portraits do not deliver reassuring slogans. They demand that one ask who these people were, what they thought, why they mattered and why, perhaps, they still do.
Céline makes the question particularly difficult. He cannot be comfortably rehabilitated into a cultural saint. His literary achievement is immense; his antisemitism remains indefensible. But history is not a guest list from which inconvenient names can simply be removed. To remember is not to approve. It is to retain the intellectual maturity required to face contradiction. That distinction seems increasingly endangered.
© Beast
There is also something moving about Beast choosing places almost nobody visits. Contemporary art has become extraordinarily efficient at locating itself where visibility is guaranteed: fairs, biennials, branded districts, institutions, feeds. Beast travels in the opposite direction. He takes enormous amounts of labour and places them on buildings already being reclaimed by weather, vegetation and neglect. This apparent irrationality is essential.
The abandoned architecture and the forgotten thinker become counterparts. Both belong to a world supposedly finished with, and both refuse to disappear completely. Beast does not restore either of them. He allows their wounds to remain visible. He makes the walls sweat history. The figures come through the plaster like unresolved thoughts, asking for attention in a present increasingly incapable of giving it. They do not offer directions so much as remind us that others have travelled these roads before us.
Perhaps that is Beast’s most important proposition: before anxiously inventing ourselves a new every morning, we might occasionally look backwards.
There are ghosts there. And some of them still know the way. www.beaststreetart.com
Instagram: @beastwalls.
