LUAP paints C'est Ne Pas Banana, a 3 × 3 metre Public Art Intervention in Notting Hill. The Pink Bear appears eating a banana, playing with an everyday object that has acquired an unusually persistent place within art and popular culture.
The banana has appeared repeatedly across modern and Contemporary Art, moving between humour, sexuality, consumer culture and the absurd. Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, Andy Warhol, Sarah Lucas, Banksy and Maurizio Cattelan have each used the fruit in very different ways, turning something completely familiar into an object capable of carrying another meaning.
LUAP approaches that history with a deliberately lighter touch. The Pink Bear stands against an intense yellow ground, peeling and eating bananas rather than presenting them as precious objects. The humour comes partly from placing another familiar figure into an already crowded visual conversation.
As LUAP puts it, “A banana is never just a banana in art. It always symbolises something else.” Here, that accumulated history becomes part of the joke. C'est Ne Pas Banana does not settle on one definitive meaning for the fruit, instead playing with the way context, repetition and cultural association can transform an ordinary object.
That familiarity also makes The Pink Bear a natural counterpart. Across LUAP’s practice, the figure can move between different environments and ideas while remaining immediately recognisable. In this work, the encounter is intentionally playful, allowing Public Art, art history and popular culture to overlap without asking the image to become more serious than it needs to be.
Painted entirely by hand over two days, the 3 × 3 metre work develops from LUAP’s original Photography using brushes and House Paint rather than Aerosol. The photographic source is reworked through Painting at architectural scale, retaining the modelling and detail of The Pink Bear against the flatter yellow ground.
Created with the support of Graffik Gallery, C'est Ne Pas Banana is installed on Oxford Gardens, just off Portobello Road in Notting Hill.
