JR, La Nascita, 2024 Courtesy of JR
French street artist JR has unveiled his most intricate Italian trompe-l’oeil piece to date, turning a square outside Milan’s central station into a transitional exhibition space of epic proportions. Titled La Nascita (Birth, 2024), the work evokes Alpine terrain with layered black and white images. Part ancient mirror image and part social experiment, it points the station, the city’s busiest maritime hub and a hotspot for petty crime, into position for possible encounters.
“In spaces that have social interests, my task is to bring other people together,” JR told Art Newspaper at an art presentation in Piazza Duca D’Aosta, a sprawling square in the shadows of the station’s 50-meter-high sky. high façade. ” In a position like this, a lot of other people come to take the train. When they stand in front of an exhibition, they will have a different kind of interaction.
JR, La Nascita, 2024 (detail) Courtesy of JR
The installation, scheduled to coincide with Milan Design Week and run until May 1, is a reminder of the golden age of railways in northern Italy. Decades before dictator Benito Mussolini inaugurated the station in the 1930s, as a monument to fascist strength and force, King Vittorio Emmanuel III laid the symbolic foundation stone in 1906, shortly after finishing the Simplon transalpine tunnel connecting Italy and France, and transformed Milan into a transportation hub.
Commissioned through the Stazione Centrale, the new public art commission evokes the mountains into which the tunnel was dug, with photographs on paper pasted onto outstretched vertical slats to shape a layered composition with the visual station behind. As with JR’s previous installations at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and at Palazzo Farnese in Rome in 2021, the artist creates the effect of a cut, this time a tunnel-like void, that crosses the monumental station.
However, while the Florence and Rome projects consisted of flat photographs fixed to the facades of the buildings, for the Milan project, JR tried to create a sense of depth. ” It’s the first time I’ve done something like this with multiple layers,” says the artist. The construction is quite intimidating, I rarely paint in such large constructions,” he adds. It took me a while to figure out how to get through this station. “
JR, La Nascita, 2024 Courtesy of JR
JR had been thinking about installing it in the square for some time. “Even before Covid, I thought I’d do anything here, but my first idea was to do something on the ground, so I watch from up there,” he says, pointing to a giant hotel overlooking the square. “I never came up with the right concept and ended up forgetting about it. “
The streets around the station are frequented by drug dealers and sex workers, and newspapers refer to the community as the “Bronx of Milan. “JR hopes the installation will show the domain in a new light.
“Even though the exhibition is temporary, even once it’s finished, visitors will never see [the station] in the same way again,” says JR. “Changing your attitude to things is a way of looking at the world differently, and that’s what I intend to do, no matter the circumstances. “