Mature Flâneur
Art in the Cracks
The streets of Paris are full of surprises
A message of love and beauty filled a crack in the pavement. I almost tripped over it. This was in central Paris, near the Opera Garnier. I watched for a while as other pedestrians stepped right over the brightly patterned tile mosaic on the sidewalk, unaware of what they were treading on. You would think people would notice, for if there is one thing Paris teaches the unmindful, it is to watch your step. Otherwise, merde! Dogshit is everywhere. But so is art. And like dogshit, art shows up in the most unexpected places on the streets of Paris, for those with eyes to see.
Since I started flâneuring in the city — wandering slowly, the only purpose to take in the sights and sounds of the street — I have become a dedicated admirer of Paris' unsanctioned “guerrilla” street art. Just recently, however, I have noticed a new trend: instead of random, individual bits of art here and there, entire clusters by the same artist are appearing in a single block or corner of the city, as if the streets are becoming open-air galleries. The crack-tile artist is one good example. After finding the mosaic by the Opera, I went back to where I remembered seeing something similar, doubtless by the same artist, on the pavement next to the Canal-St-Martin in the 10th Arrondissement:
I wrote about it here in 2021:
But now, in 2023 there are more mosaics! Within the same stretch of the canal, I found these two:
And just across the canal, a different motif, but I suspect by the same sly artist:
This kind of art fills me with joy for the human condition. It also heightens my senses for whatever else might be hidden right in plain sight. Indeed, just a little further down the street along the canal, someone added three ceramic monkey heads to an otherwise drab building. It’s as if they are looking down and laughing at the pedestrians:
Then I noticed that on the walls of the building across the street someone has stuck a few dozen photographs, encased in clear acrylic, creating their own outdoor pop-up photo gallery. On some other day, were I running errands (why do we have to run to do them?), I would probably have whizzed right by without giving the wall a glance, like this gang:
When I stopped for a look, however, I could see it was a series of portraits taken of people on the empty streets of Paris during the pandemic. They were by turns poignant, brave, and hilarious: a lone roller skater, a knight in chain mail on a crosswalk, a lost fisherman, a little girl wearing a party dress holding her doll. And a “tent city” of the homeless that had sprung up under a bridge.
Not far away, a dirty side street, Rue Ternaux, had been commandeered by a painter. Blue swallows flitted up from the grime. Above the head of a seated woman, an owl spread its golden wings. Bright red ladybugs crawled up a filthy drainpipe on either side of two mysterious and ethereal women:
Meanwhile, on the building opposite, someone had taken inspiration from a 20,000-year-old cave-art motif and put their painted white handprints all over the black bottom border of the wall.
Just one street over, Rue de la Folie Méricourt exploded with crazy gold calligraphy. Provocative messages, writ large, sang from the walls: “Do you love like a Poet, or a Pigeon?”
Also by the same guerilla artist on this block:
These artists have transformed the most mundane streets of Paris; and what a gift they have given to those of us who stumble upon them. They make us smile. They make us think. They snap us out of our hyperfocused lives, as we rush along the city streets, running our errands, preoccupied with our thoughts, watching for dogshit. Suddenly, art leaps out of the cracks and surprises us, bringing us back to beauty, to magic, to ourselves.
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Please check out my book about flâneuring: Mature Flâneur: Slow Travels through Portugal, France, Italy and Norway.
