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).
