The Rabbit Hole, Rue Jankowski in Le Mans, France

Rue Jankowski is a dead end in Le Mans’ Saint-Nicolas district, the kind of narrow passage you’d normally walk past without a second look. Then you turn the corner and the wall seems to fall away into a glowing, striped tunnel, arcing across the buildings around it as though the street itself had been punched open.

The piece is called Rabbit Hole, painted in May and June 2022 by the Parisian street artist Seth as guest of honor at Le Mans’ urban art festival, Plein Champ. It spans three buildings and six storeys of facade, using anamorphic perspective (the technique that makes a flat painted surface snap into 3D illusion, but only from the correct viewing angle) to turn dead-end walls into what looks like a real passage. Inside the illusion, a small child chases a white rabbit into the light, an image built from the same childhood wonder and escape that runs through most of Seth’s work around the world.

The fresco didn’t stay a local secret for long. Later that year, Street Art Cities, an app and community that catalogues murals worldwide, ran its public vote for the best fresco of 2022 out of a hundred selected works. Rabbit Hole made the top ten, then finished in the top five, at one point cited as the second-best mural of the year and, in the final tally, fifth, the only French entry in the global top ten.

It’s since become one of the most photographed stops in the city’s growing open-air street art collection, alongside dozens of other commissioned murals scattered through Le Mans, but it’s the one visitors specifically detour for.