In Cannes, Malmaison is reinventing itself – L’Express

It’s been decades that she had not benefited from a renovation up to her destiny. It all started in 1863 when the architects Blondel and Vianey built the Malmaison as an annexed villa of the Grand Hotel, built the same year, while the Cannes seafront loving the wealthy wintering and the luxury establishments multiply on the brand new Croisette. The residence, which mixes styles with a lenderer marked for the baroque, was enlarged in 1901 on the impulse of the Grand Duke Michel of Russia to nest its circle of golfers there. A time owned by Lord Crawford, she ended up falling in 1970 into the lap of the city, which housed its cultural activities there.

Today, after two years of construction, the beautiful lady of the iconic walk has just been a facelift, under the architectural leadership of Nelson Wilmotte (the son of Jean-Michel). If the Malmaison retains its vintage facade, a resolutely contemporary wooden roof and zinc now covers the building, embellished with a rooftop. As for the interior spaces, they were completely rehabilitated, tripling the surface devoted to the exhibitions, which occupies three floors. Total cost of the operation: almost 11 million euros.

Reinterrogated territory

The project, which enters the program “La Croisette reinvents its legend”, launched by the mayor, David Lisnard, is part of the preservation of heritage – hence this restructuring to the antipodes of the White Cube – and openness to the world to attract recognized artists or emerging phenomena of the international sphere. Center for contemporary art, the place will not slip a less event around modern art in its annual programming, the south having formed a land of reception and inspiration for the largest signatures of the 20th century.

This is evidenced by the inaugural exhibition, visible until April 20, which brings together on the theme of the Mediterranean the works of around fifty artists from yesterday and today. Titled Luxury, calm and voluptuousness – A nod to Baudelaire but also in Matisse for its table of the same name -, the hanging of the Commissioners Amélie Adamo and Hanna Baudet thus offers interesting confrontations between eras and universes, between a southern idealized in a quest for Eden full of sun and a reinterposed, even heckled territory, on the canvas.

We see the initiatory stages of Matisse and Derain in Collioure, Signac in Saint-Tropez, or Picasso in Antibes and Cannes, which find there the light and the color conducive to work on the pattern, colliding with the free figuration of Combas, the hot shades of Thomas Verny, who left in the traces of the wild beasts. The Blues and Greens of Summer, by Pierre Bonnard, are revisited by Christine Guinamand in her Chess player.

Nazanin Iranian Pouyandeh signs a hyperrealist composition, The Roundalso referring to Henri Matisse, whose homonymous canvas appears on a sketch book on the ground, while Louis Cane commits a Adam and Eve with Picassian forms. In an evolutionary sculpture made of soap and doomed to erosion, Frédérique Nalbandian, originally from Menton, takes the “opposite view of paradise found to transmit the impermanence of a threatened world”, just as Thomas Lévy-Lasne replaces the silhouette of Gustave Courbet greeting the sea. When the master, in his time discovered, amazed, the shores of Palavas, his young heir undermined the myth of the French Golden Age.

Luxury, calm and voluptuousnessuntil April 20, Malmaison, Cannes.