The rise of JR: how a French graffiti artist with a Xerox conquered the art world

A 65ft child on the American/ Mexican border by Graffiti Artist JR
A 65ft child on the American/ Mexican border by Graffiti Artist JR

In September last year, a one-year-old child appeared on the American/Mexican border near the crossing at Tecate, south east of San Diego. He was peering over the wall and smiling, his fingertips resting on the top.

He was 65ft tall. The image, which went viral, was the latest politically charged piece from J R, the French artist whose giant photographic works, pasted on buildings or scaffolding, have become famous around the world.

As a young, street-tough, graffiti artist, J R came to global attention during the Paris riots of 2005, when an image he had stuck on walls in the notorious Les Bosquets housing projects – of a film-maker friend holding a video camera like a sub-machine gun – became the backdrop to burning cars and stone-throwing youths.

In 2007, he created an illegal exhibition on the wall separating Israel from Palestine, which paired huge images of people from both sides who do the same job: barbers, shopkeepers, religious leaders, for instance, all pulling faces at the camera. It was brilliantly funny, warm and provocative.

We meet at his comfortable French studio (his main base is in New York these days), which occupies the ground floor of a nondescript building on a busy Parisian boulevard.

It’s a warm space with wooden floors, several assistants working behind desks and drawing boards, and an array of unusual objects: a vintage model crane, busts, film equipment, a motorbike. 

The 34-year-old, whose real name remains a mystery, is busy planning his forthcoming London exhibition, at the new Lazinc gallery in Mayfair, run by Banksy’s former agent Steve Lazarides.

Here, alongside a new installation on the building itself, J R will be showing the sketches for Giants, a series of athletes that appeared throughout Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics.

The most famous was a high jumper performing a Fosbury flop over an apartment building, which required him to reinforce five floors of the block to build scaffolding strong enough to withstand high winds 65ft into the sky. 

JR's recent work includes a five-storey high jumper, created for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro
JR's recent work includes a five-storey high jumper, created for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro Credit: Lazarides

“I’ve always adapted to architecture, and you see my images taking over buildings and then the buildings almost becoming too small,” says J R. Yet he stresses, “I’m not looking to do the biggest piece ever, it’s really not that. Often people say, ‘We’re going to give you this building, the biggest, tallest…’

"Wow, I’m going to [have to] spend two months on the scaffolding talking to nobody, pasting my stuff? It’s boring. Not interested.”

J R is slim and kinetic, jumping up mid-conversation to retrieve a scrapbook with images of his old works. (He has been documenting his projects almost since the beginning because, he says, “I remember being really sad when I was 17 and they would have erased my pasting by the morning”.)

At one point, he lies down horizontally across the arms of his chair to show how he used to reach down from the tops of tall buildings to write his tag with a marker. He can still see it everywhere in Paris, he says. 

Today he’s wearing a black jumper, blue jeans, hat and glasses with black frames instead of his usual Jean-Luc Godard-style shades. His look helps him to stay anonymous, he says, describing how when he crossed between Mexico and the US, he removed his disguise and proceeded to chat to the border guards about the work, without revealing that he was responsible. The structure had taken a few weeks to build; the pasting a couple of days, and all of it without permission. 

I ask if, for J R, the illegal, guerilla nature of this kind of work is part of its appeal. “No,” he says. “I never think it has to be illegal to be good. If I could do everything legally I would.”

JR was born in France to parents from Tunisia and eastern Europe. He grew up in an apartment building on a housing estate in the suburbs of Paris.

“My parents slept in the living room, so it was like, ‘you can stay out as late as you want as long as you go to school and don’t get in trouble’.”

28 Millimeters, Portrait of a Generation Braquage, Ladj Ly by JR, Les Bosquets, Montfermeil, 2004
28 Millimeters, Portrait of a Generation Braquage, Ladj Ly by JR, Les Bosquets, Montfermeil, 2004

As a teenager, he would write on neighbourhood walls with his friends. “It was only when I got fired – expelled – from high school and had to go to my cousins’ in Paris that I met some real graffiti artists. I was not scared to climb any building, but I didn’t have the style to match these guys. When I found a camera in the subway and started following them and taking photos, I felt like I’d found my space.”

He was lucky, he says, to fall in with the leader of a prominent crew of graffiti artists who lived nearby, though the group soon acquired a reputation for violence.

When he travelled with them into the centre of Paris, they would often get into fights, and he’d end up having to be picked up by his parents from the police station. It happened so many times that whenever the police called to say, “We caught your son tagging”, his mother would say, “Oh great, keep him.”

In those days, Paris was full of police but, he says: “I would follow different crews, and see how the real pros, the best of the best, would do it. They would go in full daylight dressed like a nobody with a little bag with a spray in it, and paint right behind you in the middle of the subway.

“And I thought, wow, actually the more calm you are, the more guts you have, the less you got in trouble.” When he began posting his own pieces all over Paris, the police were desperate to catch him, he says, but couldn’t.

It wasn’t long before he noticed that graffiti was an insular language, whereas photography wasn’t. “I realised how it communicated with people who would never stop to look at graffiti in the street.”

He could only afford black and white photocopies, but saw that this separated him from the gloss and colour of advertising posters, so he continued.

He has avoided working for brands or corporate sponsors ever since, even though self-financing his work limits what he can do. When he created a work on the pyramid at the Louvre in 2016, he refused to work with its corporate partners. “Brands have taken over everything, it’s almost like a last stand,” he says.

His street smarts haven’t always worked. He was arrested and deported from Israel; he went to North Korea recently and realised that it was dangerous to paste images larger than his thumb. And though he would run through the streets of Paris, “I wouldn’t run in Brazil, because they shoot you.”

Women Are Heroes, Action dans la Favela Morro da Providencia, Favela de Jour, Rio
Women Are Heroes, Action dans la Favela Morro da Providencia, Favela de Jour, Rio

He first went there in 2008, when he pasted eyes and faces on the shacks and houses of one of the no-go favelas. If his experience with graffiti gangs in Paris helped – he talked to everyone in the favela, including its criminal element, to gain permission – so, too, did his sense of being in his element even miles away from home.

“I grew up in buildings where our neighbours were from all over the world and I feel as good if I’m in Italy or I’m in London,” he says. “I think I’ve always had that because of my multiracial background. I’ve always felt like a citizen of the world.”

As with many of his projects, the favela images have been widely shared, yet his work is not about the power of social media, he says, but the ability to connect with people in the street. His gift for communication earned him a TED prize in 2011.

He used the $100,000 award to start the Inside Out project, which encouraged people all over the world to paste images of their faces on walls, buildings, landscape, as a statement. He has been inspired by the works the call-out produced, from Bangladesh to Afghanistan.

It’s not restricted to his own political vision, either, he adds, picking out a project where pensioners in Switzerland pasted on a retirement home. “It’s a wealthy city, where they have everything, but they just feel forgotten. They pasted their photos to say, ‘Hey, we’re still here’.”

This year will see the release of a documentary made by the artist and the 89-year-old filmmaker Agnès Varda. Titled Faces Places (Visages, Villages was the original French title), it follows the unlikely duo as they travel through rural France in JR’s van-cum-photo booth, photographing and interviewing the locals as they go.

As the pair create images of the people they meet, so the film slowly reveals a portrait of them. The film, which won the documentary prize at Cannes last year, has also been shortlisted for a Documentary Feature Oscar.

French director Agnes Varda and JR, in 2017
French director Agnes Varda and JR, in 2017 Credit: AFP

Their relationship began when Varda’s daughter invited J R to tea at her mother’s house in Paris. While there, he took a photograph of the director on his phone and said he’d love to do one at his studio, too.

She turned up the  next day and stayed for lunch. The day after that they decided they would make a short film together, even if it was only a couple of minutes long.

“We didn’t know each other,” says J R. “She didn’t know if I would be a pain in the ass to work with or vice versa. We just started working and then we got caught up in it. It was friendship at first sight, although it was not easy working together at the beginning. We had arguments – she had never co-directed anything in her life, so we fought.”

Slowly, two minutes became five, then 10, then 20. Nine months later, they started talking about it being a feature. There had never been a script, so the editing took a long time.

“But that was the magic in it,” says J R, “we went on the road and things happened.” Finally it was shown at Cannes. “I’ll never forget that. It was emotional – a lot of people knew it might be the last time they see an Agnès Varda movie in Cannes. There were people crying.” 

He shows me the mural he made for Montfermeil – home to Les Bosquets – pointing out all the people in it, including the mayor who once sued him for pasting on the walls there, and reflects on his extraordinary career.

“If the mayor hadn’t sued me, the riots hadn’t exploded, I wouldn’t be an artist today,” he says. “I didn’t even know galleries existed.”

These days, his gallery is the world itself.

JR: Giants – Body of Work  is at Lazinc, Mayfair, from Friday 28 February; lazinc.com

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