Photography: JR
Milan’s Stazione Centrale appears to have a brand new tunnel punching through its public plaza – a dazzling optical illusion created by French artist JR.
The trompe l’oeil artwork is called La Nascita (The Birth) and takes over the Piazza Duca D’Aosta, a huge public square abutting the train station’s 50-m-tall facade.
The artwork pays homage to Italy’s golden age of railway travel and the completion of the Alpine Simplon Tunnel in 1906, connecting Switzerland and Italy, which turned Milan into a major transport hub.
JR’s previous installations in Rome also evoked the idea of a chasm or hole. This time, he’s drawn on the idea of tunnelling through the mountains – and the station building – to create the artwork, using many layers of paper images to create a sense of depth.
He told the Art Newspaper: ‘It is the first time I do something like this with many layers. The building is pretty intimidating, I rarely work on buildings that are this big. It took me a while to really work out how to get through that station.’
