‘Un Autre Fois en Fragments’

Paris Marriott Opera Ambassador Hotel, Paris

Client: Westmont

Architect: Baron Haussmann

Design: ChandlerKBS

 

The commissions from Westmont to go to foreign cities, and make paintings for a series of hotels that reflected both the city and also the art of the city began with this work in Paris where Rankle had the idea of making photo-montages as studies from shots of the locations and where he’d asked Rebecca Youssefi, the ARS assistant art director to do the photography. During a two day walkabout Youssefi took hundreds of photographs of incidental aspects of the Parisian scene which captured her attention. For Rankle there at once became a random element where as he states in an interview with Anna McNay of STATE / f22 magazine: ‘ I’m not even aware of what she’s looked at or shot until I see the images made into montages – she makes photo-composites like the sort of thing surrealist photographers were doing.’

 

If you make an image where you have two, three or four different layers you get these unexpected narratives that no one has ever seen before and yet there’s an uncanny feeling that you’re looking at a subliminal reference to the subject. In the case of the Paris and Venice works you’re getting some very interesting signals about what the city is about.’

 

For the Opera project the photomontages were printed on to already painted, textured canvases and the paintings were hand finished with the layers of printed imagery embedded into the paint. A modern equivalent of what Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg were doing with silkscreen in the 1960.