Installed across the façade of Palazzo Ca’ da Mosto and extending into The Venice Venice Hotel, JR’s Il Gesto turns the Venice Canal Grande into a vast pictorial field—part public intervention, part intimate encounter. Engaging directly with Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, the project approaches image-making as a shared act of presence, memory, and collective visibility.
From Veronese to a contemporary Venetian gathering
The work enters into conversation with The Wedding at Cana, once created for San Giorgio Maggiore and now housed in the Louvre. Rather than echoing its biblical narrative, JR redirects attention to the idea of change itself—not as a miracle, but as a lived experience, where rupture and renewal are held within the same frame.
Across the Byzantine façade facing the Venice Canal Grande, the banquet scene gives way to 176 portraits of individuals connected to Refettorio Paris—guests, volunteers, and chefs. Each face occupies its own space while contributing to a larger composition, where recognition becomes the central gesture.
Community storytelling in art as shared authorship
Within Il Gesto, community storytelling in art is not representational but participatory. Every portrait is made with consent, and every image remains tied to the person it depicts. Developed with Refettorio Paris—founded by JR alongside Massimo Bottura and Lara Gilmore—the project places visibility and dignity at the centre of its visual language.
In line with JR’s wider practice, the work avoids distance between subject and author. Instead, it assembles a field of individual narratives that speak alongside one another, recalling the logic of his Chronicles series, where every gaze carries equal weight.
A city as a shared image
Following earlier works such as Omelia Contadina in 2020, JR continues to engage Venice as a site where civic life and visual language intersect. In Il Gesto, the canal-side façade becomes a place where individual lives gather into a collective image—less a fixed scene than a continuous act of appearing.
Video and photography courtesy of JR
