Luxury, Calm and Pleasure

Exhibition Catalogue Luxury, Calm and Pleasure. A Journey through Painting in the South of France, from Impressionism to the Present, presented at La Malmaison, Cannes (February 4 - April 20, 2025).

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a trip to the South of France became a founding ritual, an essential stage in painters’ careers. Modern painters reinvented the landscape and expressed a singular, sensual presence in the world, thanks to a practice of painting on-site in a way that liberated the brushstroke and colour.

Suspended between a sense of reality and an ideal vision of painting, this freedom to paint off the beaten track of academicism resonated with a freedom of the body, in fullness and harmony with nature. So, for these artists, the trip to the Midi was a creative impulse, but also a hedonistic quest: the search for somewhere else, for the Golden Age, the great classical mythical theme that they reinvented in the light of the present and of a new pictorial energy.

But what about today? What is the situation in a time of unbridled consumerism and capitalism, of pollution, of the Anthropocene, of countless conflicts? In the age of the virtual, of unlimited flows of information? What remains of this sensual taste for reality, this eroticism of painting? Of light, colour and beauty? What remains of the suspended time of idleness and contemplation? What has become of the issues raised by modernity in contemporary painting?

Many of today’s painters have responded to the call of the South or have followed in the footsteps of these historic figures. Gathered on the gallery walls, the works of yesterday and today create a timeless dialogue. There are recurring themes: the Golden Age, the landscape, the interior. They offer us singular visions of Mediterranean beauty, its myths, its nature and its villas overlooking the sea or facing inland. Between reality and fantasy, between pleasure and restlessness, the works respond to each other, by echoes, by plastic affinities, but also by counterpoint, reversal and discrepancy, in a blend of permanence and erosion.