The beauty of scale
Gilbert and George, David Hockney and Andy Warhol are just some of the geniuses who have found artistic inspiration in printing technology. French street artist JR has kept that grand tradition flourishing with the aid of a £63,000 grant from the TED conference and an HP Designjet Z6200 large-format printer.
JR has effectively set up the mother of all high street photo booths in Arles, the French city where Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gaugin famously spent a tumultuous yet productive summer, taking portraits of locals and printing high quality 90 x 13cm prints which, JR hopes, will be used to decorate the town and cities where the subjects live. The project – called Inside Out – has been such a success that locals have queued for hours to have their portraits taken.
JR – the alias for a street artist whose real identity remains unknown – has been dubbed the 21st century Cartier-Bresson. He has been using cityscapes as a backdrop for his art since 2004, when he started taking pictures of people in Paris’s housing projects. He has since used photography, large print and walls and buildings to immortalise people in Belgium, Brazil, India, Israel, Kenya, Netherlands, Palestine and the US. You can see his art on his official site www.jr-art.net. He describes himself as an “all-purpose wallpaper man who retired to become a printer”.
His work isn’t just a powerful reminder of the fascination human faces can still exert, it is a celebration of the power of print. As he says: “Not seeing street art in person is like visiting a museum online – you miss the spirit of the artwork.” As JR’s work has proven many times and in many parts of this world, large-format print has one powerful, irrevocable advantage over the internet: the charisma of scale.
