Toulouse: The child with a rose installed on the pediment of the Cosmograph cinema
In line with his work on humans, James Colomina, street artist from Toulouse, has installed a new red sculpture symbolizing childhood and peace.
It all started on Boulevard de la Gare about ten years ago. The Toulouse sculptor and street artist James Colomina had installed a funny red man wearing a hood, sitting on a roof…. this street artist has enamelled Toulouse and other cities with his sculptures made from body casts that give them a strange life. After the Ramblas Jean-Jaurès and the Man with the Apple Head, the Child with a Teddy Bear near Barcelona, the Child in a Donkey’s Cap or the one installed near the AZF site, this is the Child with a rose who came surreptitiously to land on the night of Thursday to Friday on the pediment of the American Cosmograph cinema in Toulouse. A masked kid, with a rifle in his hand, the barrel of which is obstructed by a rose. Once again, this artist who is very sensitive to current events, sadly recalls the fate suffered by children during conflicts all over the world: “Currently it is Ukraine and its population that is suffering, confirms James Colomina. But we can cite so many other countries in the world where wars are rife, violently banishing childhood. The place chosen, the cinema calls for culture and open-mindedness”.
Ask the world
This sculpture, once again symbolic in the work of this artist, is also a call for peace and the victory of life over nothingness.
Concerned about society and the world, James Colomina had posed last December, a red sculpture by the polemicist Eric Zemmour, at the Louvre in Paris, around a character suddenly coming out of a box, Christmas hat on his head. “I then wondered and worried about the presence of such an individual in the political debate,” confides this artist.
Is it not the artist’s own characteristic to question the world and its fellow citizens about its evolution?
James Colomina does his best with his red men, always where no one expects them. And always carrying a message.