Mr Brainwash interview: I feel like I was a good part of Banksy’s life

There is something unsettling about the serenity and sincerity of Thierry Guetta, aka pop artist Mr Brainwash.

Not once does anything seem to have surprised the French-born, Los Angeles-based street artist, 52, whether it’s working with Banksy, designing albums for Madonna or counting the Kardashians as fans. “It’s just part of my life,” he says, and the expression, perhaps now a catchphrase, comes up six times in under an hour.

He is also sweetly earnest about everything, even when it doesn’t seem to add up. When we shake hands, his are covered in paint, like his shoes and hat. Around us in Mayfair’s Maddox Gallery there is no evidence of him working and someone mentions his plane landing a few hours earlier.

He builds a point around a Picasso line he loves: “The best is the one who copies well,” he says, except this is a misquote — Picasso actually said “Good artists copy; great artists steal”, which seems rather a different idea. On love — a favourite subject — he cites a deathbed speech from Steve Jobs, in which the Apple founder cautions his family against “the non-stop pursuit of wealth”. The story is an internet hoax.

Perhaps it’s nothing — simple mistakes during a busy day — but uncertainty hangs over everything Brainwash does. Eight years ago, when Banksy’s documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop brought him overnight fame, Brainwash — with his wraparound handlebar moustache, heavy French accent and childlike enthusiasm — struck audiences as so absurd that he was used as both proof the film was a hoax (“This can’t be real!”) and proof that it couldn’t be (“You can’t make this stuff up”). Banksy and Shepard Fairey were forced to deny fakery. Today, accusations of fraud are calmly dismissed. “There is always somebody who is going to say something. Some people might see things negative. The biggest artists in history, they had the same problem, like Pollock or Marcel Duchamp.”

Though the film suggests otherwise, he talks of meeting and working with Banksy as if it were little more than an everyday occurrence. “I feel like he was a good part of my life and I feel like I was a good part of his life. We are something attached forever — when you mention Brainwash you always talk about Banksy.”

Would he like to be free of that? “There is nothing to be free of. He’s an incredible person. You cannot be free of something that happened in life when positivity came out from it. I think that for him too.”

Not that Banksy always seemed so upbeat when discussing Brainwash, who famously quoted him on a promotional poster for his work. “It’s like he says, ‘Mr Brainwash, he’s a phenomenon, and I don’t say that in a good way’. English has a humour that is very different to everywhere else, so I just took it as a positive.” There is no hint that he thinks it may have been meant differently. Are they still in touch? A long pause, a little sound of a word caught in the throat. “Sometimes.” He shrugs.

Other fans provide much clearer endorsements. Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner calls him “my favourite” on Instagram. One gushing Twitter caption — “How amazing is this!!?? #hugefan” — accompanied a grab of his portrait of the Kardashian-Jenner women painted in the style of Renoir. Pop culture icons mashed with the old masters is his signature style. “Them and Renoir, it’s kind of two cultures that don’t know each other. They would never be together and they have nothing to go together, but it’s kind of fun just to do that.”

Uncommon logic, maybe, but one that is seemingly built on a kind of motto that Brainwash threads into conversation: “It’s just to bring a smile on people’s faces.”

Isn’t there a responsibility to the great work of the past? “Art shouldn’t be serious, it is freedom of expression for everyone. Art doesn’t have a manual saying you can’t do this and that. Some people, they are like: ‘Ah, Brainwash, it’s known all over the world’ but in myself, I’m like: ‘I’m still a baby. I’m still making it happen.’ Next I’m doing this whole adventure with Maddox, with the gallery. These paintings are neon, neon because they are light, we need light.”

Because of the world’s problems right now?

“You know me, I’m not too much into politics. There are people who think about those things but it’s too high-level for me. I’m too much a kid. It’s like if you go to a kindergarten and you ask, ‘What’s happening with Trump, with Russia?’ and they shrug their shoulders. It’s the same thing with me. Me, I’m more like a person to try and make you forget.

"I’m not too much of a snob about the art world, I’m just somebody who makes it fun.”

Mr Brainwash: Keep Smiling is at the Maddox Gallery’s three London sites (maddoxgallery.co.uk), from April 19 – May 14