Nicolas de Crécy: New York sur Charente
Of all the murals in the city, Nicolas de Crécy's New York sur Charente is probably the most impressively positioned and the hardest to photograph. It is painted on a tower block standing immediately above the underpass which brings the road into the city, so that anyone driving in from the east will have as their first view of Angoulême not the churches and ramparts of the old town, but this looming vision of a transatlantic metropolis, the skyscrapers of New York transplanted to the banks of the Charente. The windows of the building are incorporated into the design, giving real, three-dimensional windows to the baroque lighthouse which dominates the foreground, and a bloated parody of a Gallic superhero launches itself into the void.
