Literature and painting

Thursday 3 July: Jean-Christophe Bailly, art historian and writer
Jean-Christophe Bailly was born in Paris in 1949. He is a writer, he is collections director for Hazan and Christian Bourgeois, and he teaches at the Higher French School of Nature and Landscapes (Ecole nationale supérieure de la nature et du paysage) in Blois. He has recently published Le Propre du langage (Editions du Seuil) and L'Apostrophe muette, an essay on the portraits of Al Fayoum (Hazan). He works at the National Dramatic Centre of Montreuil, directed by Gilberte Tsaï.

Thursday 10 July: Vincent Bioulès, painter
Vincent Bioulès was born in 1938 in Montpellier, where he lives and works. From 1967 to 1982 he worked at the Aix School of Art
" Vincent Bioulès paints not so much what is real as what we see. He is a painter who makes reality abstract to surprise his Viewers in their own appetite for seeing, knowing how to listen to their desires, delighting in some fragment or other of seeing. He is one of those painters who want us to share a particular view with them; and as a testimony to this, he makes what is seen visible by a feeling of colour that is extremely rarefied, but highly sensual. This supreme art of colour leads him to an "objective expressiveness" (text by Pascal Fancony).

Thursday 17 July: Mady Mantelin, actress and Philippe Franceschi, clarinettist
" Les Pierres Sauvages" (Wild Stones) by Fernand Pouillon
This novel is actually the log book of the building of a Cistercian abbey. The narrator is a monk who is above all a Man grappling with this monumental creation; the passion of the builder facing the contradictions between beauty and utility, between the human order and the natural order. A living, passionate chronicle told by a great architect. Cézanne's ghost is hovering …
“ So, you love this stone?
Yes, and I think it returns my love. From the first day I had a respect for it that I didn't even think of discussing.
I couldn't have talked to you about it, as I have done, without love."
“ While I give proportion and harmony to the abbey, it is the stone alone that will preserve its independent soul; the stone will stay as beautiful as a wild animal with its fur bristling … I want to leave it a little freedom, otherwise it wouldn't live."
and also doubt: “I am furious with myself, I don't do what I should. …
I haven't slept, I feel slack, my days are lazy. I enjoy chatting. I fear and flee people's eyes. I pretend to have confidence in myself … ”

Thursday 24 July: Interview with the painter Robert Combas
Robert Combas was born in Lyon in 1957. He studied at the Sète School of Art (1974) and the Montpellier School of Art (1975-1980). His first solo exhibition was held in Montpellier in 1980, and he settled in Paris the same year. In 1981, he was part of the Figuration Libre movement. Robert Combas, who lives and works in Paris, says that "like Jules Verne, without leaving his house, he went to Timbuktu."
In the artist's words: "I don't want simply to retranscribe like many graffitists, I also want to find inventive things, really create from that, for me, in me … I don't always work spontaneously and sometimes I do serious subjects, even political ones, but my paintings tend to make you laugh even when it's horrible".

RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2002 Robert Combas, une expo d'été (a summer exhibition), Hélène Trintignan Gallery, Montpellier
Les Vieux Dégueulasses (Dirty old things), Métropolis Gallery, Lyon
2001 Les années chaudes (The hot years), Couvent des Cordeliers, Châteauroux Museum
2000 Marilyn-Combas, Dewart Gallery, Brussels
Charlotte Moser Gallery, Geneva
Rachlin-Lemarié Gallery, Paris
1999 Œuvres sur papier (Works on paper), Strouk Gallery, Paris
Dessins de toutes périodes (Drawings from all periods), Centre du Monde, Nice, organised by Ben

Thursday 31 July: Sophie Dautrey, an experimental artist of "material sound", reads the "Letters on Cézanne" by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Few writings on the painting of Cézanne are more dense and accurate than this set of letters and fragments of letters sent by Rilke to his wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, between 3 June and 4 November 1907, about Cézanne's first Paris retrospective. Cézanne, humbly obstinate in his work, paints with a restrained, anonymous and neutral love until he transforms these models into "things", expressed by themselves, beyond comment, symbols on the canvas: you don't eat his apples, they just "are".

Wine and gastronomy
Presentation and tasting of White, Rosé and Red wines: Aix-en-Vignes, Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence.

Tasting of Provençal specialities: saussoun (aromatic sauce with anchovies and almonds), anchoïade (anchovy sauce), tapenades (paste of olives, anchovies and capers), terrines (meat, fish or vegetable pâtés), brouillades (a blended puree including scrambled eggs), brandade (cod puree), caillettes (pork pâté with herbs), goat's cheeses, tarts, and more … presented by the School of Provençal Traditions and Cookery "La Rabassière".