BEFORE this week I had never heard of JR. As in the artist. Not the anti-hero who, as the central figure in Dallas, the ultimate 1980s television soap opera, used to bring Tuesday nights to a deathly halt in South Africa.
Anyway. There we were on Tuesday morning having endured the 17-hour zigzag from Cape Town to Dar es Salam to Paris. It's obscene and immoral that going from way west to way east, only to end up back in the same time zone than it would have been to fly straight from Cape Town to Charles de Gaulle is more expensive than flying straight from Cape Town to Paris. A direct flight would have spared us five hours in cattle class but cost thousands more. Capitalism, jou ma se poes.
On our way out of the airport I grabbed a copy of a free bilingual magazine, Paris Vous Aime. On the cover was a photograph of a man wearing a black trilby, dark glasses, black jacket, jeans and boots standing on scaffolding in front of what looked like a rock formation. The strapline promised “Événement: La Caverne du Pont Neuf; interview, portfolio, coulisses”.
I put the mag in my bag and spent the next hour in the back of an Uber staring through incandescent sunshine at more than enough sets of caterpillars comprised entirely of taillights to make my scratchy eyes swim.
We were travel weary, but you don’t arrive in Paris before déjeuner and go to bed. So, having had to borrow someone else's shower because, mon dieu!, we couldn't possibly check in before the sainted hour of 4pm, we took the metro into town and started walking.
Which is when I saw, a bridge or three away on the banks of the Seine, what looked like enormous swathes of packaging billowing whitely in the distance. As if a bridge had had to be replaced and Amazon had delivered. Hours later I picked up the magazine again, and discovered what I had seen.
Remember Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists who made a career out of wrapping objects and structures? They did everything from bottles to scooters to the Reichstag and the Arc de Triomphe. In 1985 they wrapped the Pont Neuf, Paris’ oldest surviving bridge and the first built solely from stone rather than incorporating wood. It’s been there from 1607.
Now JR is collaborating with Vladimir Yavachev, a nephew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, to pay homage to their original creation. La Caverne du Pont Neuf, and the real bridge it encompasses, will be open from June 6 to 28.
It will seek to make viewers think about the quarries underneath the city from which the stone to build the bridge was hewn. It will hope to shock the unsuspecting who see an apparently wild cave where a piece of genteel engineering had stood. It will plan to make memories.
“May the experience of La Caverne transform the way we see the world, each other and ourselves,” JR is quoted as saying in Paris Vous Aime. “In 30 years’ time people will say things like, ‘I visited that cavern,’ or, ‘I met the love of my life there.’”
What to do? Take pictures of the work in progress. Like, duh …
What will La Caverne be once it reaches its full spikiness? Essentially, 18,900 square metres of canvas strategically and continuously inflated from 12 to 18 metres high with 20,000 cubic metres of air to conjure the illusion of rocks forming a cave over 120 metres of the 20-metre wide bridge. The completed work will cover 2,400 square metres. Around 800 people are at work erecting the project, which will weigh six tons when complete. It’s as simple and as complicated as that. The genius, as it so often is in art, is in achieving a suspension of disbelief.
Looks a bit, from up close, like a beached whale.
Sometimes you can't see it clearly ...
... and sometimes nothing can get in its way.
“It’s so tall that people will see it from avenues, streets, bridges and places I haven’t even thought of!” —JR, as quoted in Paris Vous Aime
I wasn't alone in my photographic quest ...
... but I'd like to think I knew at least as much about what we were photographing as my fellow photographers. Some of them will be able to see La Caverne du Pont Neuf in its full craggy glory, by which time we will have left Paris. But we'll always have JR.
“A boulder will suddenly appear around a street corner and that will be magical.” — JR, as quoted in Paris Vous Aime
© 2026 Telford Vice. Words and photographs.