Artist Transforms Ronchamp Into Canvas for Corbusier’s Colorful Art

Xavier Delory’s latest work of visualizations brings Le Corbusier into conversation with himself.

All images courtesy Xavier Delory

Brussels-based artist Xavier Delory has added new, fanciful visualizations to his series, “Pilgrimage Along Modernity,” which takes Modernist monuments as inspiration.

His first set of images portrayed Ville Savoye “vandalized” by Basquiat-inspired graffiti, in order to evoke the monument’s “real past state of abandonment.” As Delory told Metropolis via email, “I wanted to question the fragility of history and the choice of societies to grant importance, or not, to creations from the past.”

Delory’s latest brings Le Corbusier into conversation with himself: Delory has created a “graffiti” directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s colorful murals, particularly those painted at Villa E-1027, and grafts them on to La Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp. This “virtual intervention,” in Delory’s words, takes Le Corbusier’s belief in a “synthesis of the arts” to its logical conclusion, creating “a total work of art.”

“The explosion of color,” according to Delory, “symbolizes the many criticisms directed at the chapel at the time of its creation, whose design was accused of irrationalism, formalism, egocentricity, betrayal.”

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