French town fights off graffiti on public property with high art

Manila,Philippines

PARIS—Like most urban settings, the Paris suburb of Sevres has a problem with graffiti.

But Sevres, which lies just the other side of the Seine, to the west of the French capital, has come up with a unique way of fighting off the daubers of public property: it has commissioned young local artist Sebastian James to cover the surfaces most susceptible to succumb to the usually unsightly scrawl in more seemly frescos.

“We spend a fair amount of money every year erasing graffiti, but the financial element in commissioning these murals was just a drop in the ocean,” said deputy mayor Gregoire de la Ronciere, casting an admiring eye over James’ latest work, which adorns two 12 meter (yard) long by six meter high support walls of a road bridge in the heart of Sevres.

“The idea is that it’s better to look at a view of Sevres a century ago than grey, sad, graffiti-covered walls,” de la Ronciere said, noticing another new detail he hadn’t seen before as he admired the scene from the early 1900s that James has been laboring over since February.

The detail that caught the deputy mayor’s eye was the word “patisserie” written backwards, which James explained was a reflection of the sign on the bakery painted on the wall across the four-lane Grand Rue, Sevres’ main drag.

De la Ronciere commissioned the first mural for the town in 2002 after he saw a fresco James had painted for a private individual on a wall near Sevres’ train station that had become a favorite spraying place for local graffiti daubers.

Since that wall has been painted with a sepia-toneacrylic scene of an old steam train, it has remained graffiti-free.

The idea of embellishing Sevres with artwork, rather than have its walls defaced by scrawl, appealed to de la Ronciere, and he commissioned a first work from James, on a wall alongside a set of stairs near the Croix Bosset.

Since then, James’ works—which depict scenes of Sevres at a time when a horse-drawn tramway ran through the town, linking the Louvre in Paris to Versailles, and sparkling lemonade was bottled at the Brasserie de la Meuse in the town center—grace four walls in the town in the commuter belt.

James was a bit flummoxed, however, when he saw the two walls under the road bridge that are the canvas for his latest work.

“I stood in front of one wall for a while and wondered how I was going to do it,” he said.

That was back in January of this year. The surface was covered in graffiti, paint that’s supposed to prevent the scrawl from sticking, and that other urban plague, pigeon droppings.

“I sanded it down, then put on the first undercoat in satin cream acrylic. Then I started painting in ochre and siena to give the impression of a yellowing postcard.”

But soon, even though the work had been commissioned by the town hall, James ran into another problem: French bureaucracy.

“I found out I had to get a permit from the regional environmental bureau, because they own the road and the walls, and then I had to get another permit to put up scaffolding,” a necessity for the Michelangelesque work.

James expected to finish the work sometime in July, before moving on to “either some pillars on the highway or an electricity substation,” also in need of some artistic protection paid for by the town hall.

While James’ work helps keep the walls he works on graffiti-free, it doesn’t free up a vast chunk of money for the town, which still has plenty of virgin space to attract the daubers’ cans of spray paint.

“It costs less to get me to paint a wall or two than to every three months get a specialized firm to go erase graffiti somewhere,” James said.

“But my work and graffiti aren’t mutually exclusive,” he added philosophically.

After all, where there’s a wall, there’s a sprayer.