⚠️ The date displayed at the top of this event comes from the official source. The original description mentions other dates that may be outdated.
"Les Esquisses de la Caverne," JR's fifth exhibition at Perrotin Gallery in Paris (3rd arrondissement), opens from June 5 to July 25, coinciding with the artist's bold realization of his monumental Cave du Pont Neuf in Paris. This public art project, undeniably original and already mythical, involved temporarily transforming the Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, into a 120-meter-long, 20-meter-wide, and 18-meter-high tunnel made of printed canvas—an immersive installation that the public was free to contemplate or walk through twenty-four hours a day for nearly a month.
A homage, forty-one years later, to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's wrapped Pont-Neuf (1985), La Caverne du Pont Neuf follows in the lineage of JR's great trompe-l'œil works in recent years at the Louvre, the Paris Opera, and on the facades of Italian palaces. Inspired by the theme of Plato's cave and debates on perception (what is seeing? does seeing evoke a sense of truth or imagination?), these proposals invite reflection on semblance, illusion, and the formidable power of artistic artifice to transform the world, project our consciousness into other, unprecedented, unheard-of universes, and stimulate social cohesion through its public component. A guaranteed sense of disorientation: La Caverne du Pont Neuf, as conceived by JR, transforms the Parisian urban landscape. Through artistic magic, a historic functional structure of the City of Light becomes a tube resembling a mountain tunnel, animated by music composed by Thomas Bangalter, formerly of Daft Punk, and an interactive visitor program designed to sharpen the senses. "It's a step into the unknown," says the artist, "a journey within oneself. I designed crossing the Cave as an experience where fullness and emptiness coexist in balance." Thematically coherent, the plastic works presented at the gallery alongside the physical opening of the revamped Pont-Neuf are preparatory drawings for the project, much like the numerous images Christo and Jeanne-Claude created before their realizations. Both prospective and descriptive, these form the very foundation of the project—a factual, step-by-step history of its development, resulting from both mental conception and diligent design and arrangement work. Drawing, zinc, photography, and collage These preparatory sketches, which have become artworks in their own right, are created using a consistent technique incorporating multiple media. First, photography: JR photographs the Pont-Neuf from various angles and selects images. Next, drawing: In his studio, the artist draws and cuts out the mineral shapes that will define the actual Cave du Pont Neuf, drawing inspiration from landscape elements observed and gathered from various mountainous or underwater sites; thus prefiguring its final appearance. Another medium is sheet zinc, intended to serve as a support for both photographs and drawings via collage. Recovered from cutouts of Parisian rooftops and presented as-is, bearing marks and traces of time, it gives these works their contextual twist, their strictly "Parisian" touch. To this gesture of collage and assembly, evoking Robert Rauschenberg's working method in his Combine Paintings through accumulation and juxtaposition of disjointed elements, JR finally adds, for his drawings, a phase of calculated crumpling, aiming to puff them up and give them volume. Photography, drawing, collage, and gestural manipulation combine here to produce a homogeneous result between two and three dimensions once each element is "mounted" on the zinc support—a construction program sheet conceived not so much as a technical diagram but as a reverie, already, about the ultimate work, the true Cave du Pont Neuf as it will appear to the viewer-spectator once realized. For a quarter-century, JR has accompanied his public space installations with a lighter aesthetic baggage: his collages or, as he calls them, his Dé-compositions. These privately intended image-based works, whether photographs or lithographs, are all characterized by the primacy of montage and the juxtaposition of visual fragments. The raw world as envisioned by JR is symbolically an agglomeration of distinct, separate, isolated forms. It falls to the artist, quick here to recompose what reality decomposes, to hold these isolates together in a perspective of reconciliation, reunification, and concord. Like orchestrating for our well-being, aiming for harmony and positive surprise, our universe too rich in mismatches and solitude. Paul Ardenne, writer and art historian
Source: paris.fr — photo: © Atelier JR. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin