French Artist Creates a Mural On the Side of the Swiss Alps
09/24/2016
Curators’ Corner
Many artists say the world is their canvas, but Guillaume Legros brings a new definition to this statement.
With all-natural, environmentally-friendly paint—a homemade concoction of flour, linseed oil, water, and natural pigments—Legros took to the Swiss Alps to answer the question, ‘"What Makes a Great Man?’"
Using a picket fence to outline his canvas and a drone to measure his progress, Legros created a larger-than-life portrait of a fedora-capped man that is yet dwarfed by the surrounding peaks of Leysin.
“The exercise was technically and physically very intense,” Legros told The Huffington Post. “Moreover, my project is weather dependent as, if it rains, I can not paint. So I was in constant pressure about doing it perfectly and rapidly before the rain came.”
The perpetually shifting landscape and unpredictable weather proved to be true challenges But to the fresco painter who traditionally creates murals on wet lime plaster, the project was a lesson on ephemerality.
“The fact that it is short-lived reflects the idea that all is impermanent, nothing in our life lasts forever,” Legros explained. “The fresco is dynamic. The grass grows, the flowers grow, it rains. So the nature take its rights again over the human beings’ intervention, and this idea particularly interests me.”
Legros first came up with the notion after philosophizing about the delicate relationship that human beings share with nature. Embracing the idea of a painting that would quite literally evolve with the earth as the grass grows, he answers his own question with a touch of irony. Legros' artwork seems to express that not only should people co-exist more harmoniously with nature, but that they should do so with “a touch of humility”—a feeling he hopes to leave with his viewers as they encounter his work.
See Legros' mountainside creation in the photos below.