“La Cavern du Pont Neuf”, an installation in Paris by French street artist and photographer JR, opened on Monday after a delay due to weather damage. The artwork was damaged by high winds two weeks ago. It is on show till June 28.
With this the biggest project of his career so far, JR has said that he aims to change the way people experience the city. It is a song from the late artist duo Christo and Jean-Claude “The Pont Neuf Wrapped”, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last year.
Entitled “La Caverne du Pont-Neuf”, images of rugged rock rising above the river in black and white to cover the 232-metre-long (761-foot-long) bridge have been created. The “cave” is made up of 80 canvas arches filled with air.
JR also took inspiration from the quarries of the Paris Basin, from which the bridge’s stones were extracted. Built entirely of Lutetian limestone, also called “Paris stone”, the Pont Neuf or “new bridge”, completed in 1607, was the first in Paris not to be built of wood.
The artist – who often uses photographic images – aims to create a striking harmony between the roughness of the raw materials and the refined beauty of the so-called “City of Light”.
An architectural landmark transformed into a pure object of art
In September 1985, the duo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the same bridge in their work “The Pont Neuf Wrapped” using 41,800 square meters of golden-sandstone polyamide fabric and 13 kilometers of rope.
Like many of his works, it took him years of political negotiations and technical planning to make this vision a reality.
Press reaction was mixed and often critical. Some commentators in France questioned the idea of covering such a historically important bridge in the first place, calling the project wasteful and inappropriate.
Despite the criticism, millions of tourists came to see it, and even skeptical comments in the French media often acknowledged its impact on the way people viewed the bridge and the city: the normally passive experience of crossing the historic bridge was transformed into an active engagement with the temporal transformation of the structure and its surroundings.
Throughout their careers – Christo died in 2020 and Jeanne-Claude in 2009 – the two transformed many familiar sites through their large-scale installations.
In the summer of 1995, he draped the German Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament, in silver cloth.
In 2005, he installed “The Gates”, a series of saffron-colored fabric panels in New York City’s Central Park. Meanwhile, “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped” was completed posthumously in Paris in 2021.
JR said in a press release, “I admire the legacy of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and I share their view that the mission of art is to make us think, to question what is familiar to us.” After all, “art is a transformation, and a way to renew the way we see the world around us,” he said.
History of large establishments
The large size of the installation means that it can be viewed from many vantage points around the city, whether one is walking along the Seine or traveling on the river on a boat. In an interview in GuardianJR said the job was “100% the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
The 43-year-old artist is no stranger to large-scale, popular installations that combine photography and architectural landmarks.
In her project “Women Are Heroes” she pasted giant portraits of women on buildings and rooftops in communities around the world.
The “Inside Out Project” is JR’s global initiative that invites people to submit portrait photographs which are then displayed in public spaces.
In another optical illusion, he blew off the top of the Great Pyramid in 2021.
Perhaps his most famous work is “Giants, Kiquito” (2017), which featured a giant image of a child peering over the border wall between Mexico and the United States.
JR has been busy in Paris before. In 2019, to mark the 30th anniversary of the Louvre Museum’s iconic pyramid, he created an optical illusion of paper strips that gave the iconic structure extra depth and made it look as if it was emerging from a mine.
Nearly 400 volunteers spent several days sticking more than 2,000 10-meter strips on the ground to bring the project to life.
Earlier, in 2016, he had pasted images of the Louvre Palace with paper on the glass sections of the famous museum’s pyramid and made it disappear.
‘A symbolic crossing’
The interior of “La Caverne du Pont-Neuf” is available 24 hours a day free of charge during the entire installation period. With sound design by former Daft Punk member Thomas Bangalter, this route provides an experience in itself.
Its “JR said, “A symbolic crossing, a step into the unknown, a journey within oneself.” I designed crossing La Caverne as an experience where fullness and emptiness exist in balance.
Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier