Paris, France – Tile Art Above and Below

I saw this on the street in Paris, and it just struck me. It was some tiles put together to make C-3P0, Chewbacca, and a little alien. It was kind of a coincidence since we had just watched the old Star Wars trilogy! It was on the second floor, above a cafe. I noticed it because who would expect to see something like that there?

It’s funny because Chewbacca is waving his hands in the air, and is acting really surprised, but C-3P0 is just like, “what’s happening?” It also is interesting because there aren’t any curves in the tiles, only straight lines. And it reminds me of Legos, because you can put them together like that, since Legos also have a lot of straight edges.

I’m glad The Kid noticed the tile art that they saw. It’s by the French street artist Invader, and I’ve been enjoying seeing his 8-bit style tile art in unexpected places all over Paris since my first visit in the mid-2000s. Like most street art or graffiti, these are not authorized works of art, but they’re certainly fun and creative. We made sure to look for more of his artwork, and in the process, noticed other artwork made of tiles and cobblestones all over the city.

My photo is of the Line 12 platform at the Concorde metro station, that connects to Line 8 (which we used a lot this past summer). When we first stopped at this station, I thought the tiled letters on the walls were just placed randomly, but I knew there had to be more to it than that. So I started thinking of it as solving a word find, and I started to notice some familiar words in French. But my French is pretty limited, and I couldn’t immediately figure out what it all meant.

Later, we discovered that it’s an artwork by Françoise Schein, spelling out the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the landmark document protecting civil liberties composed during the French Revolution in 1789. And since the station lies under the Place de la Concorde, an important site during the events of the Revolution, I felt this tile art work was a fitting and intellectual tribute to that period in French history.