ZEVS

Zevs is an anonymous French street artist. He was an early and influential graffiti artist and active as a tagger in Paris in the 1990s. He is named after a regional train, Zeus, that almost ran him over one day he was down in the metro. Working with other French names of the second half of the 1990s like Andre and Invader, Zevs has been among the prominent figures who pioneered the French street art scene

In 2002 he cut out a model of a gigantic Lavazza-poster at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Above the hole in the poster he wrote: "VISUAL KIDNAPPING - PAY NOW!" This intervention not only struck a chord with art lovers and people in Berlin. It has also inspired political activists. Stealing an image from a poster in Germany is now spoken of in the media as a visual kidnapping.

"Visual kidnapping is like entering an interactive game: If the brand on the billboard kidnaps the attention of the public with the purpose of consumer demand, I reverse the situation and I kidnap the model on the poster and I demand a ransom of 500,000€ from the brand. This sum represents the symbolic price of an advertising campaign for the brand." _{Interview with PingMag, 11 August 2008}

Zevs has been doing what he calls 'proper graffiti' since the beginning of the 00s, where he writes on dirty walls with a high pressure jet.

"In the logic of walls made dirty by graffiti, Zevs, the graffiti writer end author of painted shadows has executed proper graffiti. It is about graffiti painted by use of a high pressure jet on walls." _{Alain Milon in Prétentaine, 16/17, Winter 2003-04}