French-Swiss street artist Guillaume Legros, who goes by the name Saype, has painted a huge, biodegradable fresco in Al Forsan Park to mark Switzerland’s National Day at Expo 2020 Dubai.
From the ground, it just looks like black and white splotches stretching across the grassy area. Viewed from above, however, an image comes into focus. Cast in black and white against the green of the park are two hands clasping each other in a gesture of global friendship.
The mammoth fresco spans 1,500 square metres and took 21 hours to complete. It’s a fitting theme for an artist whose graffiti tag is a contraction of the words “say” and “peace”. The fresco is part of a series by Saype titled Beyond Walls, which aims to create a symbolic human chain of interlinked hands that wraps around the globe, linking all five continents. “I think we are in a hyperlinked world and we have to find a global solution that supports people,” he said, during the unveiling of the work at Expo 2020 Dubai.
This is the eleventh stop of the project, with previous iterations mostly clustered in Western Europe and West Africa, along with Istanbul and Cape Town. Next up is the empty desert of Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi, with Ireland and Egypt also in the works.
The hands in Saype’s frescoes range from the likes of tennis star Roger Federer and the mayor of Paris to unhoused people he has met on the street. They come from photographs taken on his travels, which are then cropped at the elbows so that nobody, not even the artist, knows who they are and where they are from. All specificity is erased in favour of a universal gesture of solidarity that is immediately understood by all.