Some artists want white cubes, perfect lighting and a nice opening-night crowd. Beast wants a wall that looks like it might fall over before lunch.
His latest piece, “Want Justice? Here Justice”, appeared at the end of August 2026 on an abandoned farmhouse somewhere in the countryside near Reggio Emilia, Italy. And by “appeared”, we mean Beast spent a fairly stupid amount of time putting a 15-by-6-metre Louis-Ferdinand Céline onto a building that basically looks one bad winter away from becoming a pile of bricks.
No permission. No mural festival. No cute neighbourhood coffee shop around the corner. Just fields, dust, a lift going fifteen metres into the air and one very dead French writer.
Standard Tuesday, apparently.
Beast has been doing street work since 2009, with more than 200 interventions across 40-plus cities in Europe, the US and Japan. But somewhere along the way, instead of getting sensible, he developed an oddly specific fixation: forgotten writers, philosophers, artists and cultural troublemakers on abandoned buildings nobody seems to care about anymore. Camus. Jung. Philip Roth. Pollock. Chomsky. Basically, not exactly the cast of Love Island.
The whole thing belongs to an ongoing series called “…and we hired a bloke to fix the wall”, which Beast has been working on for three years. Spoiler: nobody fixes the wall. In fact, Beast is almost weirdly devoted to everything wrong with it. Before making the portrait, he photographs the original surface in obsessive detail. Cracks. Damp. Missing plaster. Stains. Scratches. All the horrible little bits your landlord would describe as “character”. Then he digitally transfers that exact wreckage onto the portrait. Next comes the easy bit. Except it isn’t. The image gets printed on giant sheets of paper, dragged back to the same building and pasted onto the exact wall it came from. Beast then has to line up the fake cracks printed across the face with the real cracks underneath.
Which sounds mildly ridiculous because it is. But when it works, something properly strange happens.The portrait stops looking pasted on. Céline looks like he has been trapped inside the farmhouse for the last eighty years and has finally decided to come through the plaster. That is the trick behind Beast’s work: the wall isn’t background. The wall is basically half the artwork.
And Céline is a particularly spicy choice. He was a literary monster in more ways than one: hugely influential, wildly innovative, and also responsible for antisemitic writings that remain completely indefensible. So no, this isn’t a giant fanboy tribute to some misunderstood genius. Beast is more interested in the awkward question nobody particularly enjoys at dinner: what do we do with important cultural figures who were also, at times, absolute bastards? Forget them? Cancel them? Keep reading them while feeling slightly dirty about it? There’s no neat answer here.
Which is probably why Céline looks so at home on a building that is itself falling apart. That contradiction runs through the whole project. Beast spends ridiculous amounts of time making these things, then deliberately puts them in places far away from galleries, crowds and all the usual art-world noise. And then, naturally, Instagram finds them anyway.
The paper will fade. The farmhouse will probably keep collapsing. Beast seems fine with that. The books, unfortunately for everyone who would prefer history to stay nice and tidy, aren’t going anywhere.
Instagram: @beastwalls.
