Take one of the universally recognized symbols of luxury, elegance and joye de vivre and add the disruptive style of the most important French street artist. The final effect is the Observatoire, a private and exclusive sleeping car, designed by JR for the legendary Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, A Belmond Train, Europe. Presented on the occasion of the Venice Art Biennale, it is a dream on rails that winds through different environments, including a double bedroom, a private bathroom, a lounge, a library and a secret tea room with a fireplace and a skylight. eye shape from which to admire the starry sky. It is not just an artistic installation but a real carriage. The most spacious possible, able to offer the very lucky guests an immersive experience on the move, to be enjoyed while cutting Europe in two on board the most iconic train on planet earth starting from 2025.
JR in L’Observatoire, Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, A Belmond Train, Europe
To create it, the artist, who in recent days in collaboration with Moncler has transformed Milan’s Central Station into the harsh and chiseled façade of a hollowed-out mountain, has studied the archives of the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express inch by inch, exploring the way which the Art Deco designers, René Prou and René Lalique, had given shape to the original fleet of carriages. JR was above all inspired by the great loves of his life. First of all, obviously, the trains and the spectacle of the landscape that the transalpine street artist admired when he was still a child looking through the windows of the subway that took him from the outskirts of Paris to the city center. But also the astronomical observatories and cabinets of curiosities of Renaissance Europe. Hence the choice to create environments rich in details, sometimes hidden and other intricate, and to inlays capable of attracting the curiosity and imagination of guests.
JR in L’Observatoire, Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, A Belmond Train, Europe
The Observatoire was therefore conceived as a sort of treasure chest of rarities: the street artist has in fact staged a level of detail never achieved on a passenger train. To do this he chose to exploit age-old artisan techniques while keeping the 1930s atmosphere typical of the train intact. The same one you breathe while leafing through the pages of Agatha Christie’s novels. JR, the first artist to design a train carriage for the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, has designed a carriage that is pure joy but also a seductive invitation to raise your eyes to admire the infinite vault of sky. A visionary project where nothing is left to chance. Everything is like a dream, where every detail has a story to tell.
On the other hand, trains have always played a leading role in the art of the forty-year-old Parisian. They were above all the means to transport the poetry of his black and white images to every corner of the world. This was the case, for example, on the occasion of the Women Are Heroes project, carried out in 2009 in Kenya, when the street artist managed to place large giant eyes along the carriages of a train in Kibera, a gigantic and very poor slum in the city of Nairobi. This was also the case with his later works Mind the Gap and Eye Contact, where hundreds of model train carriages moved in unison to paint an even larger picture.
JR on L’Observatoire, Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, A Belmond Train, Europe.
The L’Observatoire project fits perfectly into the style and history of the Belmond brand. In fact, it was 1976 when the visionary James B. Sherwood founded the brand (which today is part of the world’s leading luxury group, LVMH) by acquiring the Hotel Cipriani, one of the symbols of the city of Venice. Declared goal: to bring back the “golden age of travel”. One of the most important pieces of the ambitious plan was to create the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express train, which Mr Sherwood began assembling by purchasing two original sleeper carriages during a Sotheby’s auction in Monte Carlo. The first journey towards Venice, in May 1982, took place as soon as the convoy reached 17 carriages, all restored with the utmost care and skill. The arrival of the train in the lagoon was welcomed by a grand celebration right at the Hotel Cipriani, where two carriages were then detached and displayed in front of Piazza San Marco to be admired by anyone. JR’s Observatoire returns to Giudecca 42 years after Mr Sherwood exhibited the Étoile du Nord restaurant car and one of the sleeping cars in the lagoon. And in fact it recalls the myth.
