He is a French stencil artist from the first wave of street art in the 1980s. He painted his first stencil in Tours in 1982 and remains one of the pioneers and leading figures of this ephemeral art form. Many younger artists claim his influence. Jef often creates portraits of personalities such as Elvis Presley, Gandhi, Lennon, Hendrix, Basquiat, Amalia Rodrigues, Dylan, but a large part of his work is dedicated to anonymous individuals on the street: musicians, passersby, beggars, children, whose life-sized silhouettes he paints in black and white, always accentuated by his famous and mysterious red arrow, a second signature and trademark of the artist. Jef Aérosol has painted on the walls of numerous cities, including Paris, Lille, Lyon, Nantes, Île de Ré, Orléans, Tours, London, Lisbon, Venice, Rome, Amsterdam, Chicago, New York, Brussels, Zurich, Beijing, Tokyo, Palermo, Dublin, Belfast, Ljubljana… He even placed his legendary Sitting Kid on the Great Wall of China.