Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, better known as “Christo, the packager”, was a visual artist of Bulgarian origin born in 1935, naturalized in the United States in 1973, where he died on May 31, 2020, at the age of 84. In 1959, Christo became romantically involved with Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009), who has since worked at his side in the production of all his artistic projects.Christo became famous for his daring and gigantic artistic interventions that consist of wrapping landscapes, monuments, and important buildings with fabric. His artistic work responded to the aesthetics of one of the different procedures of Land art or Environmental art, a current of contemporary art that emerged in the United States in the late 1960s, which took as the setting for its action’s natural spaces, mainly, and then it was extended to urban landscapes, thus achieving a fusion between art and nature, between art and the natural and urban environment.
Christo intervened in natural, public, and urban spaces with fabrics. Wrapped Coast (1), for example, was an intervention that used 92,900 square meters of fabric and 56.3 kilometers of rope to wrap 2.4 kilometers of Australian coastline; In this way, he intervened other natural spaces such as the slopes of Colorado and Biscayne Bay, in the USA; monuments and representative buildings such as the Pont Neuf (2), the oldest bridge in Paris; and the Reichstag building (3), in Germany, among many others, in various parts of the world, whose materialization of these artistic projects involved the difficult persuasion of public administrations and complex logistics.
The elements that give artistic value to Christo’s works are the original technical procedure, consisting of the packaging -also creating a certain mystery due to what is contained in it-, the scale, the texture, the color, the light, and shadows, altering the surrounding space and the viewer’s perception by making them more aware of their surroundings.
His interventions in natural, public, or urban settings were ephemeral, remaining for a few weeks before being unwrapped. All the works of Land art or Environmental art remain in the aesthetic experience lived by each viewer, or documented in sketches, plans, models, photographs, and audiovisuals.
Written by José Gregorio Noroño, Arte Original.
