A global archive of independent reviews of everything happening from the beginning of the millennium
Read our Copyright Notice click here
For publication dates click here
*****
Discern the real from the art!
*****
*****
JARDIN THURET
Reviewed by ANDRE BEAUMONT
Villa Thuret is a plant institute where the plants do not get it all their own way.
They get hung out to dry. Those who live in glasshouses shouldn't ....
It is war between the species, too, as it is a station for the study of entomology and also one for researching the acclimatisation of exotic species.
Villa Thuret also has a wonderful, extensive botanical garden and holds a national collection of Mediterranean tree species. No gatekeeper intrudes here and the gardeners are so well acclimatised that only one was spotted, wheeling a wheelbarrow like sweet Molly Malone, on the opening day of a major sculpture exhibition, hosted by INRA, as intellectually stimulating as any I have visited this decade.
The theme was acclimatisation and seamlessly integrating as if 'no-made' (not made) but natural.
Commercial shows can be sterile, reflecting little and supping scantily from the primaeval soup of culture, so we hope this one will be catalogued to do justice to the artists.
It's a prickly contrast.
Just maybe, when historians want a different perspective of what happened in the first decades of the millennium they will come here.
Scary stuff!
So ephemeral in this garden, even the liquid.
We're missing some.
For want of a good photograph.
Oh, keep le gardien far hence, for with his fork he'll dig it up again.
Singing swing low sweet chariot.
So the Nomade rolls on and it's time to steam away like a Homburg on the sea.
*****
No one can say that I do not encourage cross-pollination of ideas between the places I frequent. [1]
In December 2019 Worldreviews will be 20 years old. It occurs to me that for most of that time I have attended a sculpture show biennially, Sculpture in the Close, in the grounds of Jesus College, Cambridge.
Slowly, over a decade and a half, the twin towns between which Villa Thuret finds itself, Antibes and Juan-les-Pins, have also become known for their summer sculpture exhibitions.
Botanical gardens and grounds where you can check entry to ensure the security of exhibits are ideal places to show some types of sculpture and, if you could do with the visitors in these days when so many towns compete for cultural importance, even better.
So perhaps Villa Thuret should think about having biennial exhibitions to follow the first in 2018.
Sculpture in the Close
