MURALS OF LYON

Lyon has a spectacular culture for murals and urban art dating back to the Romans. As one wonders through the city, not only does one stumble upon more and more breathtaking contemporary urban murals; but one also begins to notice the genre’s historical footsteps. For example, when visiting the Musée des Beaux Arts, a dazzling space I ventured into was a landing and staircase where every surrounding wall was decorated with stunning pre-Raphaelite (legacy period) murals (painted from 1884-1886). This immediately made me think of all the fabulous urban art I’d been enjoying for days and made me come to realise how much the genre can be traced historically throughout the city, from all eras since antiquity and in many architectural and urban contexts, indoors and out.

I saw so many wonderful murals! From a luminous parrot bursting out of an entire building block elevation, to an optical illusion loft restaurant, to an enormous portrait of the renowned French chef Paul Bocuse (who is somewhat of a Lyonnaise legend) and so on and so forth.

The placements of the murals were also interesting. Asides from a building’s large blank elevation being used (as is normally the case in Athens too), there were also many ‘blind’ windows, archways and doorways that were used as mural canvases, creating an architectural framing adding to an optical illusion effect, as one may at first think this a normal window in use and then realises the scene within the framing is in fact painted. These ‘blind’ architectural features, were, I assume, once functional, but walled over later in time so that the inhabitant could gain more wall space.

Or a combination of both of the above are used in that an entire blank elevation is used, but where there are no ‘blank’ architectural features, architectural features are painted in. One such elaborate example is a bookshop mural where tiers echoing those of the building’s stories are used to divide the design into oversized shelves displaying everyday objects and books, the latter most of which sit in ‘niches’ framed by painted architectural features resembling windows. A wonderful sense of movement is conveyed as a bird flies atop, smoke rises from a resting pipe and book pages flicker and turn across the building surface. By using this design approach of playing with the illusion of architectural features; many murals in Lyon give the sense, together with the architecture they sit between, that they are somehow sinking in and sinking out of 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional states, reality and fiction, what’s tangible and what is fantasy.

But I had two personal favourites of all the murals I saw. The first was a series of murals decorating the ground floor of a corner building strip club. These murals displayed a series of women, that felt like portraits of multi-racial women who sit in lush, colourful gardens. The paintings celebrate their bodies and their beauty. The works felt fresh and alive and proved that those in erotic entertainment can be celebrated and honoured as they should rather than having shame attached to their work and those who use their services. It reminded me of the glamour associated with the Moulin Rouge in Paris, and how this sector in France, is in part, rooted in a sense of elegance, grace and adoration of the female form. Sadly, the series has been vandalised by graffiti, yet in spite of this, the works are so powerful that their artistic merit is miraculously unaffected. And I’ll go even further in saying the graffiti somehow feels symbolic of those who resist this way of looking at erotic performers and themselves, projecting and materialising their reaction onto what they are seeing.

The other work I loved was a piece under the Rue Désirée street sign. I’d never seen urban art before that was mixed media. This wasn’t just a mural but had collaged elements too, so I loved that.