When Painting Leaves the Wall: Atelier des Lumières and the Immersive Museum as Show Business

Step into the high-ceilinged space in the eleventh arrondissement of Paris that was once a foundry, and the floor, the walls and the columns are all covered in the gold of Gustav Klimt. The paintings are not inside their frames. They stream past the visitor's feet, climb overhead, and slide across the body of whoever is standing alongside. When a programme of some thirty minutes completes its cycle, the gold withdraws and the colours of another painter begin to fill the walls again. Atelier des Lumières, which opened in April 2018, is the leading instance of the "immersive museum" — the form that peels painting off the wall and projects it onto space itself.

What this essay traces is a case in which the operation of turning painting into a screen has been organised as show business. This journal has previously examined screens that follow a museum's curation (the M+ facade) and advertising slots surrendered for a fixed span of time (Midnight Moment). Atelier des Lumières stands on a third economy, different from either: an immersive experience run as a business, turning on admission fees.

The Foundry as Vessel

The building is a nineteenth-century foundry. The Fonderie du Chemin-Vert, established by the Plichon brothers in 1835, manufactured cast-iron parts for the navy and for locomotives and ran across four generations before closing in the first half of the twentieth century. Culturespaces, an operator of cultural facilities, found this long-dormant space in 2013, took a lease on it, and converted it into a venue for immersive display. The floor area is roughly 3,300 square metres. High walls that had retained the memory of industry became, as they stood, the projection surface.

At the technical core is a proprietary system that Culturespaces has named and trademarked AMIEX (Art & Music Immersive Experience). AMIEX was first implemented in 2012 at the Carrières des Lumières — the quarries of light — at Les Baux-de-Provence in the south of France, and Atelier des Lumières was the venue that carried the method into the city. The hall is rigged with some 140 projectors and some 50 speakers for spatialised sound. Images from multiple projectors are laid over one another without seams, erasing the distinction between wall, floor and column and turning the entire space into a single continuous image.

Here is one pole of the category this journal calls "GA (画)." Painting was originally a plane enclosed by a rectangular frame. Atelier des Lumières strips that frame away and extends the image across the whole inner surface of the architecture. Visitors do not look at the painting; they walk into it. The plane of the screen is turned inside out into a space that surrounds the body.

Show Business with Classical Painting as Its Material

The venue opened on 13 April 2018. Its first programme was Gustav Klimt, taking the painter's golden phase as its subject. Gianfranco Iannuzzi and others handled the staging, and it was shown alongside a short on Hundertwasser and POETIC_AI, a generative work by Ouchhh.

Since then, Atelier des Lumières has repeated its classical-painting programmes on a roughly annual cycle: Vincent van Gogh in 2019; Monet, Renoir and Chagall in 2020; Dalí and Gaudí in 2021; Cézanne and Kandinsky in 2022. Signature works by celebrated painters are translated into the vocabulary of spatial immersion. Paintings by old masters already in the public domain carry a light burden of rights clearance, and their names pull strongly on visitors. Choosing classical painting as material is also a rational decision as a business model.

Running alongside these long-form programmes, meanwhile, have been short "complementary programmes" by contemporary artists: Ouchhh's POETIC_AI (2018), Thomas Vanz's Verse (2019), Nohlab's Journey (2020) and Everything (2021), François Vautier's Recoding Entropia (2022). The immersive display of classical painting carries the main work of drawing an audience, and into the gaps between those shows the abstract moving image of a contemporary digital artist is inserted. Principal and subordinate; the guaranteed name and the new experiment. Two tiers of programming take turns above a single space.

Light as a Network

Atelier des Lumières is not a standalone facility but the flagship of the "Lumières" group that Culturespaces operates worldwide. Culturespaces, the operator, is a private cultural-management company founded by Bruno Monnier in 1990, and it also runs the Musée Jacquemart-André and the Musée Maillol. For a long stretch the energy group ENGIE was its largest shareholder, but in 2022 it was acquired by the investment firms IDI and Chevrillon.

The network of immersive venues has spread from its origin at the Carrières des Lumières in the south of France (2012) to Atelier des Lumières (Paris, 2018), the Bunker des Lumières (Jeju, South Korea, 2018), the Bassins des Lumières (Bordeaux, 2020), Infinity des Lumières (Dubai, 2021) and the Hall des Lumières (New York, 2022). Amsterdam and Dortmund have facilities of the same type. What the venues share is that each converts a large space carrying an industrial or military memory: a former foundry, a quarry, a submarine base, a water reservoir. A gigantic ma — an interval that has served out its purpose — is restarted as a vessel for light.

Atelier des Lumières is reported to have drawn more than two million visitors in its opening year alone. A public good, classical painting, is projected into a vessel of industrial heritage and turned over on admission fees. That combination produced a new form of show business, distinct from both the museum and the theatre.

What It Means to Stand Inside the Image

When a painting sits inside a frame, the viewer keeps a certain distance and looks at it. The frame draws a boundary between the one who looks and the picture that is looked at. Atelier des Lumières erases that boundary. The image crosses the wall and flows onto the floor, falling across the bodies of the audience. Before they know it, those doing the looking are standing inside the image being looked at.

This reversal resonates with what this journal has seen in earlier cases of urban screens: the moment when the crowd walking in front of an advertising screen is regarded from the side of the artwork; the pedestrian who catches a museum facade at the edge of vision from across the harbour. The relationship between screen and person is such that the larger the screen grows, the more the direction of looking and being looked at begins to waver. Atelier des Lumières has shut that wavering indoors and made a product of it, as a guaranteed experience.

The tenkei kindled here stands not on an outdoor street but in the dark interior of an industrial ruin. In the opened-out ma of the high walls of a foundry that has finished its work, the colours of classical painting are lit once every cycle and then go out. The same Klimt rises on the same wall, repeated day after day. Whereas the calligraphy of the Museum of the Future was a fixed meaning that presumed no updating, the images at Atelier des Lumières are swapped out programme by programme. But that updating moves to the rhythm of a show-business calendar rather than the rhythm of a museum's curation. To the question of what to project on the wall, this venue has answered: a name that draws crowds, delivered as an immersive experience. That is at once one completed form of a new medium and a new circuit for consuming classical painting. Holding the two apart is the starting point for grasping accurately what is taking place on the dark walls of the factory.

Sources

1. fig.001Atelier des Lumières — Exhibition videos(公式)
2. fig.002Atelier des Lumières — Gustav Klimt(公式)
3. fig.003Atelier des Lumières — Dalí, the Endless Enigma(公式)
4. [4]Atelier des Lumières — History of the place(旧鋳物工場の沿革)
5. [5]Culturespaces — Our history
6. [6]Culturespaces — Exhibitions / sites(Lumières ネットワーク)
7. [7]Barco — Where Barco projectors bring art to life at Atelier des Lumières (2018)(2018-08)
8. [8]The Art Newspaper — Paris digital art venue Atelier des Lumières is a hit and expanding abroad (2019)(2019-02-22)
9. [9]The Art Newspaper — Culturespaces opens digital art centres in New York and Dubai (AMIEX)

Operations Record

OPERATOR

Culturespaces, a private cultural operator founded in 1990

LOCATION

Paris

MODEL

Ticketed show — Two-tier programming: public-domain classical painting shows as the core, with commissioned contemporary shorts alongside

CADENCE

Programmes rotate roughly annually, continuous since the 2018 opening

SPEC

A converted foundry of c. 3,300 m², with c. 140 projectors and 50 speakers (the AMIEX system)

SINCE

2018-04

STATUS

Active

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