aixcentric

Carrieres de Lumieres, the former quarry now centre for immersive art displays, has announced its theme for 2021, and it’s one that should prove popular with the Aixois…

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1897

It will be a celebration of the work of Paul Cezanne. 

The design and production for this show is being masterminded by Gianfranco Iannuzzi who produced the excellent ‘Chagall, A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ in 2017.  Of course it won’t be the first time that Cézanne’s works have been featured: back in 2006, his paintings were celebrated to mark the centenary of his death. The complex was run by a different company then and the productions were simpler.  It’ll be interesting to see the new 2021 version.  And the company say that complications around the pandemic won’t hold it up. ‘On ne peut pas hesiter,’ is the line.

Indeed. Hesitation seems the last thing on the mind of Culturespaces.

The original quarry, the Carrieres de Lumieres, was followed by a disused factory in Paris, now the Atelier de Lumieres, a South Korea bunker (Bunker de Lumières) and a Second World War submarine base in Bordeaux (Bassins de Lumières).

Culturespaces is now partnering with events and media giant IMG to open in New York. It is converting 28,000 sq. ft of the former Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in Tribeca, a Beaux-Arts building leased from the Chetrit group, into a new venue known as Hall des Lumières.  Construction work is due to begin “shortly”, a Culturespaces spokeswoman says, with the opening date scheduled for 2021-22.

Over to Dubai now where the Infinity des Lumières will open in early 2021 with an immersive experience animating Van Gogh’s paintings. According to the Culturespaces website, the venture is a franchise with the Spanish group Metra and will take up two floors of the Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest shopping centres.

Newfields to celebrate Van Gogh

Meanwhile, in a separate move, Charles Venable, CEO and director of Newfields (formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art) is removing his institution’s floor of contemporary art to replace it with the LUME, a son-et-lumiere dedicated to Van Gogh.  They are calling it “the largest exhibition experience in Newfields’s 137-year history” and promises to “transform two-dimensional paintings into a three-dimensional world that guests can explore through all their senses.” It is set to open next summer.

But he says that his interest in this kind of installation dates back much further. He personally encountered “digital mapping technology choreographed to music and works of art” more than five years ago at a Chagall in Les Baux du Provence.

“I saw a brochure for it and I thought, ‘Oh I don’t know if I’m going to like this,’” he explained to Artnet News. “Frankly, I was mesmerized. It was a program on Chagall in this incredibly dark space and all of a sudden these projectors came up and you could just walk through it.”

A visit to the Carrieres de Lumieres is always pretty special. No wonder the concept is thrilling art-lovers world-wide.  So looking forward to the Cezanne show which opens early March.

The Bassins de Lumieres only opened in June but has clocked up 400,000 visitors already