Miss. Tic, one of the Parisian figures of street art, died on Sunday May 22 following an illness at the age of 66, his family announced to Agence France-Presse. She was known, in particular, for her silhouettes of dark, sexy and poetic women stencilled on the walls of the capital.
Radhia Novat, her real name, was born to a Tunisian immigrant father and a Norman mother. She started printing her art in 1985 in the streets of her childhood neighborhood of Butte Montmartre, Le Marais, Montorgueil and Butte-aux-Cailles, after a stay in the United States. “I came from street theatre, I liked this idea of art in the street”, explained in 2011 to AFP this visual artist, with a matte complexion and beautiful black hair, like her heroines.
“I thought first: I’m going to write poems. Then: We need pictures, along with the poems. I started with self-portraits, then I continued towards the other women”, she explained. And this, while she regularly accompanied her stencils with incisive captions like: “I put on wall art to bombard words hearts. »
Exhibited regularly in France and abroad since 1986, Miss. Tic – whose pseudonym comes from the character Miss Tick, the witch from Carl Barks’ Disney Scrooge Bunch – has had a tumultuous journey. Indeed, she had some run-ins with the law. The tag or the stencil being considered as damage to goods. She was even arrested in 1997. Far from being bad news, this arrest will eventually attract the attention of major brands in the 2000s, especially in the fashion world with Kenzo or Louis Vuitton, for example.
In 2007, she signed the poster for Claude Chabrol’s film The Girl Cut in Two, while La Poste produced stamps inspired by her stencils in 2011. As her website recalls, some of her works were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Contemporary Art Fund of the City of Paris.
On her social networks, the announcement of her death is accompanied by a photo of the poet and visual artist in her studio. Dated March 2022, the photo shows the artist, regularly exhibited in France and abroad since 1986, smiling behind her round glasses, with short gray hair. The general public will surely remember the black hair – which she herself wore for a long time – of her heroines graphed on the walls of the capital in particular, which paved the way for many artists.
“I had a lot of respect for his career,” said Christian Guémy, alias C215, another figure in French street art, on Twitter. He salutes “one of the founders of the art of stencil”, believing that “the walls of the 13th (arrondissement, editor’s note) will never be the same again”. His 65-year-old colleague, Jef Aerosol, mourned his contemporary on Instagram, who “fought the disease with so much courage”, evoking “so many moments shared since the beginning of the 80s”.
“Her stencils, which have become iconic, resolutely feminist, will continue to poetize our streets for a long time”, reacted on Twitter the new Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, celebrating “a great artist”.
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