Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada
This was one of the projects that came to me through a contact of a friend where these people were looking for an artist that was already working on social themes and could do a very, very large scale piece. The fact that the project was based on child labor and child slavery was something that was actually very, very important to me. It’s the kind of project that I want to be involved in, so I was very excited with that. I wanted to find a way where I can do multiple layers of children and I figured that the best way to do this was to do a portrait that was so large that the eyes would give an iris area (that would be about 1,5 metres, 6 feet from side to side) to be able to paint within the iris the images of other children . So, we have this one child which is a white caucasian child and then we have other children from the 3rd world who were actually photographed in the moment when they were rescued. So, we have different layers to this situation. We have one child who is probably safe, but there’s actually child trafficking going on in NY city as we speak. We can’t assume that it’s just a problem from somewhere else, there’s also a problem in our own backyards. I think that’s how the final design came. The idea of the green, the grass and the flowers is this uthopic idea of what childhood should be and the fact that this isn’t always the case. And I like the fact that was a juxtaposition to the concrete jungle, to all the brick and cement in the city

Funny anecdote:
One evening when the artist's lift failed and he was stuck high he was rescued by a fire brigade patrol who reacted on a false alarm. If they weren't there Jorge was stuck up there for a long cold night

Artworks in New York City