Large Scale French Graffiti
How do you put a painting on a Parisian rooftop? Start with les drones.
French graffiti artists Ella and Pitr have painted Europe's largest work of street art on a roof of a Paris convention centre. Covering 2.5 hectares, the image of an old woman intersected by the ring road around the French capital can be fully viewed only from the sky.
Only from high above can one see how it adds up to an image of an old woman, looking down at the traffic on the Périphérique, the busy ring road that surrounds the French capital. The duo stated that “Her eyes are half closed because she’s very bored by all the fast stuff around her…We wanted to find something with a lot of contrast with the geographic site,” which is full of traffic both by car and foot.
Photo: Objectif Aéro/Ludovic Delage
The duo gained access to the roof through an arrangement between city officials and Art en Ville, a group promoting urban art in public places. This isn’t the first time the duo has created projects like this. Ella + Pitr have created other large-scale works in France, Portugal, Chile, Canada and elsewhere since they met in the French city of Saint-Etienne in 2007.
The new work covers a surface equivalent to four football fields. It breaks the artists’ own record, set with a mural in Norway in 2015. Amazingly they completed the mural over eight days in June using acrylic paints diluted and loaded into spray cans.
The duo brilliantly used drones to create it while referring to aerial photos of the roof. Because of it’s location, even by standing on an adjacent rooftop, the full image is not visible and the Olivier Landes, the curator and founder of Art en Ville stated that “We’re counting on the Internet and the media to spread the aerial image, which will be viewed virtually, on a screen, like all works of urban art.”
The artwork itself will exist until 2022, when the hall is to be demolished as part of a renovation project to prepare the complex for the 2024 Olympic Games.
We hope you enjoyed learning about Large Scale French Graffiti! What are your thoughts on this new form of urban art? Does it add character to the city even though it can only be viewed online? Join the conversation below!