19.2.11

The Walls Have Eyes

Xerox is the name of the game for French street artist JR. This month the self-titled photgraffeur descends on Los Angeles as part of the exhibition, The Wrinkles of the City, which has already seen his distinguishable work of enlarged black and white photographic portraits of local inhabitants in Spain and China. Twenty locations are scheduled to get the JR treatment that will depict intimate facial features of various Angeleno citizens on derelict building faรงades and walls throughout the city. There is an incredible magnetism to these works - whether it's the severity in the way he crops the portrait that is so alien to us in contrast to the perfect proportions of advertising campaigns or the raw nature of his subjects that are so overpowering on the passerby, JR captures the fragility of society and canvasses over the gaps on our urban landscape where the manipulated image of capitalism has yet to reach.
Follow JR's paper trail on his official website here.