Interrupting the status quo is something we associate with Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada. From “culture jamming,” where he employed marketing strategies to call attention to the detrimental social impact of targeted advertising or the “Identity Series,” where he utilized random locals in massive charcoal drawings, he is using art as resistance. The same is true of his current “Outsight” project in Laon, France.
The mural covers the side of a residential building and depicts a young boy with gently sloping symmetrical lines across his face. He’s not looking directly at the viewer, but rather looking blankly into space, but seems deeply impacted. There are, what appear to be, melting stripes of paint off of his right side, like there’s a part of him not fully formed and yet is already falling apart. There’s a single tear about to fall, but he’s stoic, like a child of war. Notably, replacing the boy’s iris is a “play” button symbol.
Gerarda invites us to question the effects of children viewing their world through the symbol of the ‘play’ button and a mobile phone from such a young age.
The color of the stripes stands out, they are varying shades of skin tones, they feel like a mask and a prison. And through this, we can’t decide what he is, his race is undeterminable and it seems to highlight the ridiculousness of skin color categorization.
Gerada (b. 1966) was born in Cuba, raised in the United States, and now resides in Barcelona. He has created a number of large works in urban spaces, some so large they can be seen from space. His focus is on using walls and streets as his canvas and ordinary people as models in his work. He was a founding member of the Culture Jamming movement in New York City and has subsequently launched the Identity Series (ephemeral charcoal drawings) and the Terrestrial Series (ephemeral earthworks that can be seen from space). His important large-scale works include “Out of Many, One” created near the White House in Washington, D.C. commissioned by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and to create mural designs for the Spanish Pavilion at the Dubai World’s fair.
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