aixcentric

A visit to Les Carrieres de Lumieres is a must for art-lovers in Provence.  The disused quarry walls provide a brilliant backdrop for projecting massive paintings simultaneously in a head-spinning display, accompanied by specially-chosen music which can add another layer of meaning.

The themes this year, 2021 to Jan 16 2022, are Cézanne for the 30 minute programme, with Kandinsky for the shorter session.

Looking forward to the Cézanne, I was amazed that it was the Kandinsky show that blew my socks off.  His brightly coloured abstract motifs whirled out of their frames, spinning across the rough surfaces like constellations.

One superb moment came when the wheeling patterns were set to David Bowie’s Space Oddity, ‘I’m floating in a most peculiar way and the stars look very different today’…I just thought both artist and musician would have so loved the experience.

After which the Cezanne show had a more conventional treatment- we saw his portraits, landscapes of Provence and of course those colourful still-lifes which zinged out from the walls.  It was all accompanied by classical music – I did long for a bit of Gloria Gaynor to go with Madame Cézanne that long-suffering lady – but the culmination didn’t disappoint.  It was a quickfire, multi-shot view of what felt like dozens of versions of ‘Montagne Sainte-Victoire’ which obsessed the artist all his life.  Unforgetteable.

If all this is new to you, there’s a post here about how this concept is being taken up elsewhere in France, but also now globally.. https://aixcentric.com/2020/11/12/carrieres-de-lumieres-lots-of-news/

Details for visiting here: https://www.carrieres-lumieres.com/en

Parking: there is a small parking area near the entrance, but it is not easy to park here;  and when we visited last month, after the rentrée, spaces were chock full from the bottom of the hill that leads up to the village of Les Baux.  We dropped lucky in that someone was leaving up at the top…but you might want to keep this in mind when going as the prebooked tickets are timed.  Hopefully though, with the show drawing to an end on 16 Jan, things have quietened down.