Wallpaper offers artists and designers an opportunity to translate their designs within a domestic environment. The Rudolf (ca. 2015) wallcovering manufactured by Élitis is the first lenticular print produced for the interior. Lenticular printing is the process of multiple pictures intertwined into one image that produces a three-dimensional effect and creates a new medium for artists and designers to creatively communicate to the public(1). Élitis is an essential figure in interior decoration that creates and publishes furnishing textiles and wallcoverings by combining innovation in terms of materials and exuberance to make dressing up an interior a real art of living.
Élitis was founded in Toulouse, France in 1988 by designer Patrice Marraud des Grottes (b. 1951). Fascinated by the beauty of the Greek Islands, des Grottes named the brand after the contemporary Greek poet Odysseas Elytis (1911-1996)2. Des Grottes states that “browsing a collection is like setting off on a poetic journey”3. Through his profound interest with words he offers each of his collections and products with evocative names and titles.
The Rudolf wallcovering is one of six lenticular designs in Élitis’ 2015 collection Wonderland, an elaborate and whimsical oeuvre that symbolizes youth and childhood memories. The Rudolf design shows an image of an animated stag, whose antlers change between three marvelous and vibrant patterns. When we first encounter Rudolf his antlers are white and decorated with radiant blue, coral and gold floral motifs that are embraced with gold vine decorations. Upon movement, Rudolf’s antlers transition into two other animated patterns; suddenly creating this idea of fantasy. The quirkiness of Rudolf and the dramatic use of lenticular technology instantly transforms an anticlimactic interior into an all-encompassing installation within the privacy of your own home.
Shandale Winston is a first year graduate student at the Master’s Degree in the History of Decorative Arts at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum/Parsons New School for Design.
(1) Barry Johnson, “From the Cracker Jack Box to Mainstay Advertising and Marketing-Lenticular Graphics Have New Life,” GATFWORLD 17, no. 3, (June 2005): pg. 28.
(2) ÉLITIS, http://www.elitis.fr/en/history/, (December 2016)
(3) Ibid
