This large urban chess game placed at the entrance to the city is one of the first frescoes created in Boulogne-sur-Mer. Signed Jacques Salvignol, then director and teacher at the Municipal School of Arts, it is a metaphor for life where traps are to be avoided in order to achieve one's goal and fulfill one's destiny.
This fresco resembles its author. Jacques Salvignol evokes here the human condition and the course of an existence where man evolves from step to step, from box to box... The whole thing being not to fall into the wrong one, an abyss that puts an end to all hope. The chessboard of life represents a long road that tends towards infinity. What's at the end? It's everyone's mystery...
The goal is to lead one's life as well as possible. The characters who are staggered in an absolute linear perspective wear a black hat like the artist. As they move toward their destiny, moonlight casts their shadow behind them. Poetic and prophetic.
If Jacques Salvignol is the author of this fresco in 1983, he had entrusted "the cardboard" and the realization to René Bence painter in letters to Wimereux and his apprentice Jean-Pierre Hénuier who was none other than one of his former students of the School of Fine Arts in Boulogne-sur-Mer.
For the record, in accordance with the original drawing, it was a crescent moon that lit up the characters. But during a site visit, Jacques Salvignol was no longer convinced of his choice and finally opted for a full moon. This final retouch located 18 meters high at the highest point of this fresco was carried out by his former pupil to the satisfaction of his master.