“Grotesques & Chimères”:
Unit dimensions: approximately 80 x 100 cm
Hand-painted wallpaper:
Width 85 cm: €16.00/m incl. VAT
Width 106 cm: €18.00/m incl. VAT
Pattern printing: €75.00 incl. VAT per piece
+10% varnished version
“GROTESQUES & CHIMÈRES”:
I really loved 18th-century England, the Adam brothers (Osterley Park, Syon House, etc.) to the point that,
when my job was to paint on walls,
I was often inspired by the Pompeian frescoes, of which there are so many graceful examples in those places.
Now, I no longer paint on walls, but I have a fabric printing studio. So, I wanted to, or perhaps my brush
—which knows the recipe so well that it can almost thread the ingredients onto these light skewers by itself— prompted it to me,
but the fact remains that I wanted to return to it. The state of nonchalance created by this kind of automatic writing of habit
is perfectly suited to a genre whose main rule consists of assembling, by a tenuous thread,
characters, animals, or imaginary objects, often themselves already composed of a paradoxical montage
between the animal and human worlds, inanimate objects and living beings.
A logic certainly closer to that of dreams than any other.
A pure play of scenery, of unpretentious distraction. Monsters, certainly, but all grace and politeness,
and which lend themselves more to smiles than to shudders.
Almost every era has lent itself to this game inspired by the frescoes of Pompeii;
here is a modern version that has retained only a shadow of them, as if to strive for an even lighter style of writing.
Text written to present a series of printing designs in May 2006
Excerpt from “On the pattern”, issue 6 of the book
“By Agnès Emery Par Agnès Emery”
AAM Editions