MAISON PIERRE FREY

LOUIS BARTHÉLEMY X MAISON PIERRE FREY

At the request of the Pierre Frey design studio, the artist Louis Barthélémy has imagined a genuine contemporary fresco celebrating the Nile, the nourishing river, and the abundant life that exists along the river.

Dividing his time between Cairo and Paris and an unconditional lover of Egypt, Louis Barthélémy drew on the symbols of ancient Egypt: pairs of animals, praise for the nativity, a hippopotamus erected as a divinity, lotus flowers with magical powers, zigzag patterns representing the ancient Nile, ending in a circle evoking infinity, stars covering the ceilings of the temples...

All these elements are available in wallpapers and panoramic designs whose paper frame and iridescent finish evoke a contemporary retranscription of a papyrus. In another version, they are also majestically embroidered with wool on rustic linen, a plant fibre sacred in Egypt symbolising purity and the goddess Isis.

The artist, after a phase of research and conceptualisation, first draws with a pencil to create the outlines of what will become a wallpaper or a fabric. He finalizes the drawing on the computer in order to adapt it to the current means of production and to colour it according to the emotion he wishes to arouse.

Through the scarves that Louis Barthélémy designed for Dior, the tapestries or collection of shoes that he created for Louboutin and this almost pop fresco that he imagined for Pierre Frey, the duality dear to the artist between East and West, the chaos of Cairo and the institutional order of Paris, the work of the hand and that of the computer, contemporary creation and references to antiquity... Louis Barthélémy's work fits in perfectly with Pierre Frey's Merveilles d'Egypte collection in collaboration with the Louvre Museum and conveys with finesse a continuous reading of a cultural and universal heritage.