Commuters traveling from Gare Saint-Lazare to Vernon-Giverny in France get to gaze up at a selection of impressionist art from the Musée d’Orsay applied right onto the walls and ceilings of their train cars. The SNCF (French National Railway Company) collaborated with the adhesive experts at 3M for a summer-long installation that will make rail travel a lot more beautiful and relaxing. Three double-height cars on the RER line have been altered for the project, photographed by Christophe Recoura so the rest of the world can catch a glimpse, too.

An adhesive graphic film printed with impressionist scenes was carefully applied to immerse train travelers in these serene compositions starring the vague painterly brush strokes the movement is known for. Each car has its own theme: gardens and water, local landscapes or Paris industrialization.

This particular line serves visitors heading to Normandy, the birthplace of Impressionism and home of the annual Impressionist Festival. Sight-seers can gaze up at works by painters like Claude Monet as they travel to his former home in Giverny or to the André Malraux Museum (MuMa), which hosts the second-largest collection of Impressionist works in the world after the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

In fact, a long-serving steam train line direct from Paris to Normandy is credited with encouraging artists to travel to that lush, peaceful corner of France in the first place as Normandy became home to a new school of open-air painting. The trains carried the artists, their families and their aristocratic clientele back and forth between the two cities, delivering them from the modern metropolis to a countryside full of cliffs, meadows and Gothic cathedrals.

Glistening like the scales of a terrifyingly enormous sea creature, the bizarre landscape covering the floor of the Centquatre art space in Paris is delightfully surreal. WasteLandscape is an art installation in a former funeral home, made of 65,000 discarded CDs.

Architect Clémence Eliard and artist Elise Morin collected the CDs and connected them into a reflective blanket using wire. Inflatable mounds provide the strange, evocative hills of the landscape.

The installation will remain at Centquatre until September 10th, when it will begin a tour of other locations. The CDs will eventually be recycled. Say the artists, “WasteLandscape will be displayed in locations coherent with the stakes of the project: art role in society, raising consciousness to environmental problems through culture, alternative mode of production and valuation of district associative work and professional rehabilitation.”

“It is well known that CDs are condemned to gradually disappear from our daily life, and to later participate in the construction of immense open-air, floating or buried toxic waste reception centers. Made of petroleum, this reflecting slick of CDs forms a still sea of metallic dunes: the art work’s monumental scale reveals the precious aspect of a small daily object. The project joins a global, innovative and committed approach, from its means of production until the end of its ‘life’.”