From Barron's Penta:
A circling zodiac of golden stars beams from the midnight-blue
ceiling of the Albertine Books reading room, opened last September in
the French Embassy on Fifth Avenue in New York. The effect is kinetic,
dazzling: a mural—or is it a fresco?—that bends like the night horizon
to the tops of the richly gilt-trimmed mahogany bookcases.
Except…it’s not a mural, exactly. And despite the look of texture and
depth, there’s no plaster up there. There’s no gilt or mahogany on the
bookcases, either. And the spray of stars achieves its eye-roaming
luster from a few scattered gold-leaf novas amid others merely painted
gold.
- The Albertine reading room at the French Embassy in New York, where the trompe l’oeil effects dazzle the eye.
“Partly, that was a question of funds,” explains Philippe Courtois, 42, the CEO and impresario of Atelier Premiere,
the New York-based branch of a high-end, semi-medieval French
decorative-arts company, Atelier Mériguet-Carrère, headed by his
brother Antoine. Philippe’s team of 50 artisans and apprentices,
schooled in Old World skills—preppers, decorative painters, figurative
painters, gilders, plasterers—have descended on homes and private
airplanes, and on places as diverse as the White House (they repainted,
repapered, and refurbished the Oval Office in 2011) and a yacht in
Florida, with neoclassical landscape murals painted around the master
bathtub, and walls and furniture sheathed in gold leaf.
The Albertine bookshop commission came via its designer, Jacques
Garcia, a longtime collaborator of the brothers Courtois. Though Atelier
Premiere is not typically engaged by budget-minded clients, Philippe
relishes the ingenuity required to bring the Albertine work in on the
numbers.
The central zodiac ceiling panel was executed in Atelier’s studio in
Harlem—wet paint and dusty construction sites don’t work well
together—and then affixed to the Albertine’s ceiling. Its apparent
depth and texture is created by an exuberant laying on of different
paint effects, including sponging and bold brush strokes. The deep,
gleaming “mahogany” of the plain-wood bookcases came from stain and a
wax satin finish rather than the pricey, multi-layer varnish process
Atelier Premiere is known for. The moldings and trim are faux brass
(another effect), and even the inset “panels” on the walls and doors
turn out, upon closer inspection, to be painted.
The finished product at the French Embassy bookshop is a jewel box,
and in its way a metaphor for the “hands across the water” approach
that has served Atelier Premiere so well: “We are an American company
with French skills,” states Courtois, whose New York-based artisans at
this point are in fact mostly Americans, the long-term employees now
handing down the skills they learned from the French crew that founded
the stateside company 10 years ago.
“They are really the old-fashioned school of an atelier, of
apprenticeships,” says interior designer Frank de Biasi, who has
collaborated with the Courtois brothers for 20 years. “People move up
the ranks according to their skill levels; you just don’t see that kind
of thing here.”
And the U.S. has proved to be a target-rich environment. “I don’t
want to do social studies,” Courtois says. “But in America, people
really give a lot of importance to their homes, and they really don’t
want to have the same thing as the next person.”...MORE
There's Fool the Eye and then there's
Really Fool the Eye:
Afin de ralentir les cyclistes un peu trop imprudents sur Regent's Canal à Londres, la British Waterways a fait appel à deux artistes pour peindre un impressionnant trompe-l'œil.
