In 1990, while teaching at a school of architecture, I produced, in my solitude but also in great liberty, a series of large paintings in pastel and gouache paint. It was the fulfilment, on paper, of the style of architecture I would have wanted to do if I had tried…and had a demand. I never attempted to display these paintings in the art market, not only out of a personal rejection of the milieu, but mostly because I never adhered to the idea of a painting locked up in a frame and hung on a wall (except in a museum). In the vein of William Morris, I consider that art must be applied and therefore incorporated into the gestures of everyday life. This is exactly the reason I studied architecture instead of painting and it was an obvious choice that I began creating tiles, paints and furniture with my own showrooms as a sales points. This occupation became so devouring that my large architectural paintings were soon forgotten in the back of a workshop, hidden away like a family secret.
Only a few members of my elected family are aware of this secret. In the mean time, a young man became carried away with the panoramic wallpapers in the Zuber Museum in Rixheim and decided to set up a publishing company for digitally printed wallpaper with high quality technical requirements. In the world of digital printing there is a bit of everything from the office printer to prints that are purchased by collectors and museums. I admittedly did not create art galleries in Brussels, Paris and London but modest showrooms where I want to sell the editions of my paintings as an additional logic to my universe. Now, even more so than ever, that I have discovered the possibilities of digital printing, which has opened my mind to the incredible possibilities held in the magic of the slightest detail, or faintest crack in the original painting that can be enlarged to infinity or almost. A single section of the original can be selected and adapted to a piece of furniture or placed as a panorama on an entire wall! The made to measure possibilities have no limits and each one is a reinvention of the original piece of work…
Agnès Emery
5th June, 2018