The absurd and the dream that turn reality on its head on the Côte d’Azur

Villefranche-sur-Mer – Entitled "The Absurd and the Dreamlike", this project brings together artists Arne Quinze and Joana Vasconcelos in this historic French village until 31 October. The exhibition uses the poetic, the surreal and the unexpected as tools to transform the perception of a space. Monumental sculptures, immersive installations, paintings, videos and sound works are spread throughout the rooms of La Citadelle (the 16th-century fortress overlooking the village), from the open air to the interiors, creating a journey where matter seems constantly on the verge of changing its nature. Jean Cocteau, an almost natural presence in this part of the Riviera, provides the key to understanding the exhibition. In Villefranche-sur-Mer, the poet, film director and illustrator left an indelible mark: he frequented the harbour, worked in the nearby chapel of Saint-Pierre and transformed the Mediterranean into one of the favourite landscapes of his imagination. His films, particularly "The Testament of Orpheus", still seem today to provide a grammar for this place, with doors leading elsewhere, figures traversing time, and apparitions that need no explanation.

Alongside Cocteau, it is natural to also evoke Salvador Dalí, another great architect of the dreamlike unease of the twentieth century; but whilst he turned dreams into a dizzying mental spectacle, distorting clocks, bodies and landscapes to the point of rendering them unstable, Quinze and Vasconcelos bring the uncanny into everyday objects and into the landscape. They have no need to dissolve reality, but alter it through an unexpected scale, a domestic object stripped of its function, a tangle of plant forms and a surface that reflects light in an unpredictable manner.

La Citadelle is not merely an exhibition space, but becomes part of the artwork itself, with its ancient stones, iron, the greenery of the gardens, the sea horizon and the austere geometry of military architecture all interacting with Quinze’s organic and feverish forms. The Belgian artist works on structures that seem to proliferate like plant organisms, with metals, colours and lines intertwining in a sort of impossible botany, where the sculpture retains something of nature’s spontaneous growth. Vasconcelos – whom we met recently in Rome, as the featured artist in the ‘Venus’ exhibition at PM23 in Piazza Mignanelli – introduces, by contrast, another order of disruption. Her universe often arises from the encounter between fine craftsmanship and the most commonplace objects, between domestic memory and a monumental scale. A tool, a fabric, a decoration or a recognisable element of everyday life changes status when she magnifies it, recomposes it or strips it of its original function. In the dialogue between the two artists, the object thus loses its innocence and is no longer merely what it appears to be. The new collaborations created for the exhibition accentuate precisely this short-circuit, with different materials, craft techniques and contemporary languages coming together in forms that seem to belong simultaneously to sculpture, architecture and dreams. The result is a continuous shift in perception.

As we visit this exhibition – curated by Selcan Atilgan (founder of ARTSA Consultancy) under the direction of Camille Frasca (director of La Citadelle) and Clare Lilley – we walk through the fortress and notice that what once belonged to the architecture becomes set design, what appeared to be sculpture now looks like vegetation, and what once belonged to the house takes on the dimensions of a landscape, proving that “The absurd is not the same as chaos, but a different arrangement of things”, as Vasconcelos reminds us. In the end, one is left with the impression of having seen Villefranche transform for a few hours, precisely thanks to art, which manages to intervene in the landscape without erasing it. For a moment, the Mediterranean regains that indecipherable quality that belongs to dreams even more than to images.