1330 collection

On a trip to Tuscany I discovered a magnificent 13th century cloister, like so many in Italy. Its walls were covered with more than 2600 meters of frescoes, until the disastrous fire of July 1944, caused by an aerial bombing, destroyed a large part of them. Fortunately, a significant portion has since been restored.

The commissioners certainly gave the painters the task of inspiring the religious idea, the sense of the divine… the pure flight of the soul.

With their monumental dimensions, the iconography used, and the genius of the Italian painters of the quatrocento, these frescoes impress and remind us of our condition of humble mortals.

Masterpieces are revealed over thousands of square meters, and yet it is on the bottom of the walls, where the frescoes are the most altered, almost disappeared, where figuration has flaked off to the point of becoming abstraction… that my gaze was drawn, that my soul vibrated.

The moving beauty of the traces of fresco pigments that have suffered the ravages of time.

On these walls I saw the World: the embers of a fire, the waves on a black sand beach, a volcanic landscape, the veins of a tree, the texture of leather, constellations…

This discovery aroused my wonder, a moment of grace, a revelation. A revelation of small details, and even of fragments unnoticed by all because topped by such grandiose and narrative works.

A revelation shared with the photographer Anne-Emmanuelle Thion, a sensitive artist who, like me, is receptive to the emotion aroused by wabi-sabi. Through her framing and her photographic work on the pictorial material, she has turned these fragments of frescoes into works of art.

We felt it important to share our emotion and make it accessible, and called upon the best French laboratory mastering the sublimation process.

At 1600 degrees Celsius, the ink penetrates each fibre of the canvas, making the process unalterable. The canvas is then stretched on a (140×90 cm) frame signed Tianem, (Thierry & Anne-Emma), numbered on 12 copies.

Genesis of a work of art, born from a fragment… of the memory of a fresco. It is now up to you to project your own imagination.