‘Art is the shortest route between human beings’

(André Malraux)

Make art a part of your stay in Nice by visiting a permanent exhibition of paintings and sculptures.

Vincent Bioulès – L’île Maïre II.

One of a series of Marseille landscapes, this painting reflects the ‘masterly puzzle of stone and sea’ that characterises this island off the coast of the city of Marseille. It is typical of the work of this great ‘southern artist’ who claimed to be ‘trying to make tiny details work with large ensembles, to achieve as much control as possible over the entire surface in all of its internal power relations.’

Gilles Suffren – Equilibre, 1985

Gilles Suffren is an artist who likes to play with the ideas of balance and imbalance, full and empty, substance and space. What he is expressing with his sculpture in earthware and iron is a suggestion of movement, as he searches for the fragile crux between stability and instability, the interstice between all and nothing…

Bartolani – Caillol – Kasatchok, 1997

This work was created by a pair of artists, Judith Bartolani and Claude Caillol, both influenced by ‘plastic, home appliances, television, telephone, motorways, the conquest of space and the moon, Pierre Cardin and the Prisunic supermarket chain…’

As a result, this sculpture of ‘boots without the sound of boots’, whose title brings to mind the bowed legs of the famous Russian dancers, combines the joyful and gaudy colour of plastic with an anatomical jibe!

Bartolani and Caillol use humour and poetry to invent forms that can be adapted to all sorts of environments; far from the white space of art galleries, their sculptures can fit in anywhere; ‘a work of art is never absurd regardless of where it is, or if it is, it is because all poetry has been displaced,’ they seem to say to us.

Enjoy your stay in Nice in the company of the works of art that help us make the most of life!