Galerie Fréhel

The Louvre has two rooms of monumental, large-format French paintings from the early 19th century. But those rooms can't compare with the only monumental, large-format, outdoor street art gallery in Paris. Which happens to be right across the street from where we live.

I'm calling it "Galerie Fréhel" after the square that provides the vantage point - and the wall space - for the art. Place Fréhel is also home to Culture Rapide, which gets in on the street art action with its security shutter. You have to wake up pretty early in the morning to see this, since Culture Rapide is open around 18 hours a day.

The main event - Galerie Fréhel in all its glory - is best appreciated from the north side of the Rue de Belleville.

Sorry for the terrible picture, but you get the idea, and what's important is that we haven't seen anything like this anywhere else in Paris. The crazy thing is, it keeps getting better. Originally there were four artworks, all in the right half of the picture above: 1) the "Il faut se méfier des mots" trompe-l'oeil by Ben[jamin Vautier]; 2)  the horizontal bands that form a quadrilateral if you're standing in exactly the right spot, which I am in this picture, by Jean-Luc Albert; 3) the architectural cone in the corner, by Marie Bourget; 4) the "detective" mural by Jean Le Gac. Now there are five artworks, thanks to the newest one on the left, which was painted two days ago (Sunday, March 21) by ZOO project, an anonymous artist whose work we've admired elsewhere. Here's a close-up of the new piece:

I managed to catch the artist in action, and in the picture above you see him taking down his ladder. The wall on which he painted may eventually be covered by whatever building is going up on that lot (construction has been slow and it's unclear what they're planning) but in the meantime we get to enjoy this provocative art. The caption is taken from a song by Renaud: "I yelled for months, I shouted from all the rooftops, Society, you won't have me."

We saw this second ZOO project work from Rue Oberkampf way back in the fall. It's since been painted over, but the artwork and message ("be statistically correct, have 1.5 children") stuck with us, so it was easy to make the connection between the two works. If you're into the artist's style, there's a Flickr group dedicated to the artist, and great shots on individual blogs.

Even if the new ZOO project work gets covered up, Place (or should I say Galerie) Fréhel will still be the Louvre of contemporary street art, at least in Paris. And who knows - maybe some day, we'll think of the Louvre as the Galerie Fréhel of pre-20th-century art.