PARIS: a surrealist trompe-l'oeil

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PARIS: a surrealist trompe-l'oeil

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    As you walk along the avenue George V, heading for the champs-élysées, you stop wondering: in the distance you perceive a troubled perspective. Is it an optical illusion, a reflection or a mirage?
    Is this tormented building  the work of an architect under influence or the first masterpiece of Frank Gehry in Paris? A declination of his “dancing house” in Prague? Closer you realize it's a trompe l'oeil. An illusion to trick the eye.
    The classical haussmannian façade seems to melt in the sun. Windows and balconies cave in. No more symmetry, not a straight line left, the architecture has lost its balance.
    The authors said to be influenced by Dali soft watches in the painting “the Persistence of Memory”. Mastering what he called “the usual paralyzing tricks of eye-fooling,“ Dali painted with what he called “the most imperialist fury of precision,“ but only, he said, “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.“ (quoted in MoMA highlights).

    Most of the time, a trompe-l'oeil tries to copy reality with an extreme accuracy; here it invents a new reality inverting it, it creates a world of dream, or nightmare, where walls dissolve.

    This visual aberration is a manifesto of “le surréalisme urbain”. Urban surrealism ? Not really, surrealism is about subversion and there is no subversion here. Just an action of communication. The Bleeker group asked the society Anthem, well known for the Vuitton suitcase on the champs-élysées, to imagine a cover for their building. The plastician Pierre Delavie took clichés of the existing façade, distort the image and printed it on a huge canvas sheet of 2500 square meters. Some relief cornices are stuck to the photo to enhance the reality or unreality of the trompe-l'oeil.

The office building in renovation, 39 avenue George V, is now hidden. Even though the approach is more commercial than artistic, the result is a parisian success. This ephemeral trompe-l'oeil will be removed at the end of the renovation.

See the french article on: http://archeologue.over-blog.com/article-6969508.html

More photo on: http://www.flickr.com/photos/palagret/888084728/