Urban-Trait-hunter: on the trail of Jorge Rodriguez Gerada

Ever feel like when you're dating someone, you've been here before... and that the only reason you're across the table from them is because you're after a particular trait? I feel like that with my harem of pretty cities sometimes.

"I'm sorry, it's not you, it's me. "

I'm just on this highly myopic hunt for.... the work of a particular architect, a shop (for a while, it was cities with a Muji store).... and tonight, it's the work of Jorge Rodriguez Gerada.

I had the rather good fortune of seeing Gerada's work while I was hunting down Parc de Diagonal Mar in Poblenou (after getting hideously lost in Eixample). I had my head half-buried in a rather tatty map, my hand mournfully clutching a woefully empty bottle of no-water, when suddenly... I ran into this strange, bespectacled woman peering somewhat gloomily out of a rather nondescript piece of urban "blah". And I almost missed it.

I walked on a little bit more before turning back, unable to figure out why I found it so attractive. I half hoped I wasn't turning into a gerontophile... but stranger things have happened.

Took ages to figure out who the artist was.

Love the way he uses scissor lifts, cherry pickers, knuckle booms to execute his work.

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Gerada's work is unsubtle - but that description is probably a bit of an obvious one given the scale at which he works. Yet his images are surprisingly fresh and charming in their "everyday" quality - billboards grabbing for attention, featuring (for one brief visual "sound"bite) an expression tied to the lay of the city, and the city of one person. The choice of material - charcoal - caught my attention more than anything. So often, people who dress a building with their art capitalise on the longevity of the medium, using vivid colours that cling tenaciously onto their hosts. But here, Gerada creates in the raspiness of charcoal, ash-like and ephemeral - a singe over render, mortar and concrete. For a minute, I resist an unfair comparison with Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". There is nothing apocalyptic here. Only a smudge in days on the years and decades of a city.

Gerada's official webpage is here.

Images shamelessly taken from here.

Gerada's email exchange with the folks at Wooster Collective (or one of the guest bloggers there).