In a solo exhibition at Perrotin, JR’s sketches and photography of the monumental La Caverne du Pont Neuf will be on display from Oct. 28 to Dec. 19.
For a fleeting moment this past summer, JR gave people a reason to pause. He created a mountain in the middle of Paris.
The French artist transformed Paris’ oldest standing bridge into “La Caverne du Pont Neuf,” an immersive mountainscape constructed of inflated canvas arches. The piece, on view for a few weeks in June and the largest public installation of JR’s career, was an homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s monumental 1985 work “The Pont Neuf Wrapped.”
“When it appeared in Paris overnight, it stopped the city. It had the ability to stop time,” says JR, describing the installation’s scale and presence. “People would stop and look and take a photo and try to understand what they’re looking at. What in our life makes us stop from the crazy nonstop of things?”
Inside the illusory structure, visitors could walk through a cavelike interior, which included a soundscape by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, earthy olfactory experience, and an augmented reality component.
JR has leaned into the symbolism of caves in recent installations, bringing rocky trompe-l’oeils to distinctive landmarks that include the Palais Garnier and Milano Centrale railway station. Like those earlier works, “La Caverne” taps into Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and exploration of reality versus perception. JR drops in the idea of “Picnolepsy,” a term coined by Paul Virilio to describe the state of momentary absences from reality, and likens it to a familiar activity: doomscrolling.
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