"Nemo," a central figure among the Parisian pochoiristes, comes to this diverse company of public artists from the playgrounds of childhood. He made his first stencil in 1980 for his children and their playmates in Belleville, a working class and immigrant district of Paris where he has lived for over twenty years.

A "sprayer of fairy tales," many of Nemo's images spring from the jungles of a child's imagination: tigers, cats, hippos. His black silhouette-man is always rushing, chasing bouquets of multicolored flowers, birds, butterflies and balloons is always rushing or waiting in some improbable place. His images often carry a wistful, dreamy sadness, a sadness that attracts children. Grave yet humorous, his work catches the odd moment and lightens the heart. Nemo and Jerome Mesnager often went out together with children to make pochoirs. "Children really like the spray cans," Nemo says, "it's like magic for them."

Like other pochoiristes, Nemo sprays his magic primarily in the poorer districts of Paris: "I only do my work in real, alive neighborhoods," he says. "After OLGA [a government agency that cleans walls] erases one of my images, the people will say, when is Nemo coming back to put up new ones?"Nemo considers himself an artisan instead of an artist. "What interests me is that a stencil is "open": one person will see one thing, another something else. The more people see different things in my pochoirs, the more I "win"....The more a pochoir makes you think," he says, "the better is it is."