Blueprint Cartoon Astronaut — Company Plaza Sculpture, Toulouse

An engineering company asked for a mascot and then specified that it must not look like a mascot. What they actually wanted, once it had been worked out in a second meeting, was a sculpture that looked like one of their own documents.

Cyanotype, and why this company recognises it

The finish is a sun print: a deep Prussian-blue ground carrying ghostly white silhouettes, with the soft blurred edges and the uneven blotchy staining of a print exposed by hand. Before digital reproduction, every drawing a company like this produced was copied that way, and the reference was understood instantly by everybody in the building and by nobody outside it. The piece is an in-joke for the people who work there, which is the correct audience for a plaza sculpture.

Surviving outdoors as a print

A cyanotype’s whole character is its unevenness, and unevenness is exactly what a paint shop removes by default. The ground went on in five overlapping passes with deliberately inconsistent film thickness, so the stain blotches sit in the paint rather than on it, and the white silhouettes were then painted back as soft-edged shapes rather than sharp ones. The whole piece is closed under a UV-stable clear coat, which is what stops a Prussian blue from going grey outdoors inside two years.

Three metres of silhouette

At 3.2 m the figure has to read as a shape in the plaza before it reads as an astronaut, so the helmet and the chest pack were both enlarged against the drawing and the limbs thinned slightly. The visor is a blank white oval with no face in it, which is the one place where the print convention and the cartoon convention want the same thing.

On the plaza

It stands at 3.2 m on the main approach, oriented so that the sun crosses the silhouettes around the middle of the day, which is when the building empties and refills. The company’s own note is in the panel above.