In 1985, Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris in one of their iconic buildings, covering the bridge with nearly 40,000 square meters of woven golden-beige polyamide fabric, secured with rope. The work emphasized the bridge's architecture, arches and sculptural qualities and, through its erasure, highlighted the importance of historical presence in the urban landscape.
Forty years later, artist JR honors that legacy with his take on the Paris monument. La Caverne du Pont Neufon view until June 28, transforms the city's oldest bridge into a giant platform for immersive multimedia and olfactory experiences that serve as a reminder of emotions. The aim is to draw attention to the bridge's material origins—stones related to topography and geology—while bearing witness to the city's diverse history. Combining the green and the wild with the refined beauty of the City of Light, it creates a dialogue between the past and the present.
While some Parisians complain about the inconvenience of commuting and daily traffic, disconnecting the installation has been a very powerful thing for many. Known for his disruptive urban interventions, JR accepts that the debate a public art project will provoke is of equal value to its realization. For him, art is a way to renew the way we look at the world around us, and we spoke to him after the revelation La Caverne du Pont Neuf to better understand the vision and goals behind a large project.
Moving slowly between portraits, public art, public intervention and relational art, JR's large black and white photographs, attached directly to buildings, streets, rooftops and monuments, turn the urban landscape into a canvas and a stage, evoking imagination and awe by telling a visual story. But he made a name for himself with eye-catching trompe l'oeil installations that disrupt and redesign iconic buildings, landscapes and charged spaces. Often, they carry a political message or convey a public invitation.
In what can easily be described as context-specific public performance, he works with scale, visibility and public participation to transform the city into a place of shared memory and imagination. In Paris in 2016, for example, he took the iconic pyramid of the Louvre with a memorable monument. The secret of the Great Pyramidcreated for the 30th anniversary of the glass pyramid. With La Caverne du Pont Neufhe adds another layer to his work: respect.
JR tells us, bluntly, that he wouldn't dare touch the Pont Neuf alone. It was the Fondation Christo et Jeanne-Claude and the Amicale des Ponts de Paris who approached him, asking him to think about something for the 40th anniversary Pont Neuf Rolled. “This project begins as an invitation and as an act of respect,” he says, and the artistic duo became the inspiration for this new work in a practical way. Vladimir Yavachev, who worked alongside Christo et Jeanne-Claude for 35 years, helped JR to dream and find ways to build it: “What I took from them is not style, it's philosophy. It feels natural.”
What they wanted to advance with the intervention of the Pont Neuf was the couple's strong idea that a person can create something that is useless in any practical and transient sense, and yet that work can make thousands of people stop and look again. “They always said these shows were about freedom, happiness and beauty,” JR recalled. “I've spent 20 years asking how art can bring people together rather than divide them, and a temporary job in the middle of the city is the way I can do that, it's free, empty and gone.” Like Christo et Jeanne-Claude, JR is not interested in leaving a physical footprint. “The work disappears, what remains is what has changed in people's heads. I haven't looked at the Arc de Triomphe the same way since Christo wrapped it. The Cavern do that even to other people who are going through it, and we will enter the idea into the new century.”
At the same time, he wanted to reveal the hidden material history, opening up a green, mineral space in the middle of the city and allowing people to experience the quarry from which the bridge literally emerges. The installation emphasizes the bridge's history, both material and social, anchoring it in the urban landscape. Conceived as an invitation to reconnect with our origins, it works almost like a Situationist intervention, redirecting attention to the lived experience of the place. In doing so, it temporarily interrupts the ways of increasing distribution of urban spaces that characterize modern life, restoring a heightened awareness of the human environment and the city as a place where one should feel instead of just passing through, which awakens attention between isolation and urban disruption, asking people to look again, as did Christude and Jeanne-Cla.
What stands out the most is the intensity La Caverne du Pont Neuf the stages between human history and geological time, and how stone combines and transmits that history. Completed in 1607, the Pont Neuf—the “New Bridge”—was the first bridge in Paris to be built entirely of stone instead of wood. “It's the oldest bridge in Paris,” he said, and the stone came from a limestone quarry in the city—”the stone of Paris,” with which most of the city is built, from the Louvre to the Panthéon. We don't think about it, but under Paris and around it, there are these huge quarries of building stone. It may be the reason why the city has had an unusual combination of its fountains and its stone over the centuries, he speculates. “I find it interesting: the bridge is human history, but it's a geological thing, millions of years older than anyone who's ever crossed it.” It is an idea he touched upon in interventions at the Trocadéro, the Palazzo Farnese, the Palazzo Strozzi in Italy and the Opéra Garnier.
JR readily admits that he has a similar interest in self-deception and disrupting the way people travel in Paris. “This work refers to Plato's cave: the shadows on the wall and the food scrolling on our phone are not so similar,” he explained, noting that the length of the crossing, people are taken out of that noise, and advertising that always catches the eye, and returns to something much older than all of us. “All civilizations, even those that have never met, share the same myth: that people come out of the cracks of the earth. When you enter a cave, you feel that mixture of fear and fascination, almost returning to the womb. Uncovering a stone and creating an illusion is the same act for me: both ways to make people look again.”
Much of JR's later work has kept the illusion on the surface. With La Ferita in Florence, Rome and the Pyramid of the Louvre, he cut holes in the facades so that one could see into the building, but the audience sat outside, looking in. La Caverne du Pont Neufwhich from the outside looks like a mountainous area, the community literally enters a 120 meter illusion. He hopes that with that change, the audience will stop being spectators and become participants. He says: “If you just look, you live in your own world. “When you cross, the daylight almost disappears, the walls become heavy and uneven, the rhythm of the city slows down, and for a few minutes, something in you resets. I always say that changing the way you see the world is the way to change the world, and you can't really do that outside. You have to be in it.”
He designed the cave as a complete experience, with sound design by Thomas Bangalter. “He calls it a 'sonic story, without being music,' and it follows the light, the change of space, your progress through the tunnel, so that the sound becomes something you walk through,” he explains. With Snap's AR Studio in Paris, they then created a digital overlay inspired by Étienne-Jules Marey's 19th-century chronophotography, allowing visitors to “see beyond the cave” from a phone or through glasses borrowed from the site. Light, here, is a method, like a smell. Sarah Bouasse designed the olfactory element of the installation—the smell of the earth after the rain, the first thing everyone connects to. “You have stone, sound, light, smell and image all working on you at the same time. You go into the shadows to come back to the light, and hopefully you go and look at the world, at others, and look at yourself differently.”
In this remarkable gesamtkuntwerk, unwritten natural events became part of the history of the piece. The Caverne was brought up just before Paris started an unusual heat wave at the beginning of the season, and then there was a strong storm, which damaged the installation and pushed back the opening scheduled for June 6. JR saw something appropriate in that: “We are returning the green energy of nature to the heart of the city, in the way we gave it, but nature is also what dictates what we should live in the world. Our respect.”
The monument was quickly repaired and is now accessible on June 28. Meanwhile, its presence extends beyond the site. Perrotin presents a free exhibition “Les esquisses de La Caverne” at its gallery in the Marais until July 25, while Paris Aéroport, one of the project's partners, has developed a special commemorative passport, designed as an invitation to explore Paris by visiting the famous places where JR has left his mark over the years.
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