The big mystery behind those Drake billboards: Who's the artist?
It's a stunt even bigger than Drake's pool, but what's it got to do with Comme des Garçons?
And here we thought TIFF's Space Jam Live Read was the biggest cultural spin-off to come out of the NBA All Star Weekend. Actually, it still might be. (Watch those social-media feeds for casting updates!) But speaking in purely figurative terms, it's all about Drake.
As the self-annointed "6 God" proclaimed last month, his next album, Views From the 6, will arrive in April. And lo, that news is being brought to the good people of Toronto from the heavens, carried forth on billboards inscribed with cryptic messages.
Drake himself Instagrammed this shot of Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square late Monday.
Earlier, Toronto's Billy Bishop Airport tweeted these posters, featuring photographs of the CN Tower under construction and another sign proving Drake made it out of Degrassi with a solid understanding of arithmetic.
And, of course, plenty of fans have noticed all of this without following #vft6 on Twitter.
We're not concerned with the shrouded release date of Views from the 6 (and not just because that "four plus two equals 6" poster seems to pretty well spell it out). We'll leave that business to the kids at CBC Music. What we want to take a look at is who's the artist behind these billboards?
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When Drake dropped his single "Summer Sixteen" last week, he credited the artist Filip Pagowski for the record art, and while that name might be unfamiliar, Drake's been a fan for years.
The Polish graphic artist has been extensively published, with work appearing in The New Yorker and the (now defunct Canadian mag) Saturday Night, but he's best known for creating the Play logo. If you don't know that particular icon by name, let this vintage Drake pic remind you of its ubiquity.
A simple red heart with eyes, Pagowski created the logo in 2002 for Play, a youthful off-shoot of Japanese fashion brand, Comme des Garçons.
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Bold, colourful and, well, playful, it's indicative of a lot of Pagowski's work — which Drake's very own blog paid tribute to in 2009. We've included some of their favourite examples, along with a few more rounded up from the web...
Back in 2012, Pagowski blogged about the Play logo's enormous popularity, sharing photos of all the ways it had been co-opted and re-interpreted by fans in everything from nail art to school design projects. Drake's "eye-catching" View billboard over Yonge-Dundas Square makes us wonder: is Pagowski playing around with his own logo this time?