Strictly speaking, Jerome Mesnager - who usually does not sign his works -is not a pochoiriste because his images are drawn freehand. But MesnagerUs consistently-rendered figure is read in the same way as a stencil. His white ghost wanders the streets of Paris at night, climbing, resting, leaving its imprint on doors and walls. Mesnager's white figure emerged from a meditation on light. By eliminating all colors and the canvas itself, he explains, the painter finds himself alone, and finds himself part of a living, internal canvas. "When I find the right door or wall, everything goes fast," Mesnager says. "I jump against the wall in the pose I want to represent and I paint very fast. It takes 26 seconds."

Mesnager chooses his sites with precision and, like most Parisian wall artists, he finds the oldest surfaces the most inviting: the catacombs, the ancient stone facades, walls that look as if they came from the original quarries from which the city was built. "More and more I find debris interesting," he says. "It has color and an atmosphere that carries emotion."

His white figure has been seen as far from Paris as the Great Wall of China and lurking near the pyramids of Egypt. "The little white man wanders/He is a luminous ghost/He haunts deserted places - from a 1989 poem by Mesnager.