From Nice-Côte d’Azur Airport to the Park Inn Hotel, it’s just a step. This step is taken daily by businessmen, representatives of companies whose headquarters are located in the immediate vicinity of the terminal. All the more reason to thank them for their loyalty. Hence the invitation extended last Thursday by Paola Valzoano, the General Manager of this establishment, an invitation that was well understood despite her inimitable Piedmontese accent.
Airlines (Lufthansa, Alitalia, Delta, Austrian…), tourism organizations, representatives of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and as Minister Colbert recalled, those who finance them (Banks and Savings Bank), no one was missing. With Christmas approaching, the guests left with a large bag filled with numerous gifts. This distribution of souvenirs was preceded by a buffet organized around themes related to nature. Voss waters, aloe-based cocktails whose virtues the server extolled… almost fully. And then the wines from Château d’Aille from a Var estate grouped around an old chapel, confirming the words of writer Jacques Lacarrière in his “Loving Dictionary of Mythology” (Plon 2006): Dionysus was indeed “the first of the gods with passion.”
And it was enough to hear the young oenologist Pierre-Antoine Besson, freshly arrived from Mâconnais but already in love with Nice, to be convinced. But mention Italy, and arts come to mind. And Paola had done things right. The evening was dedicated to the works of Canadian artist Carol Bruton. Much like the evening’s guests, she is a great traveler: childhood in Spain, studies in England, Fine Arts in Madrid and Edinburgh. That probably didn’t satisfy her. The call of vast spaces was heard. Africa and the Middle East, including Lebanon, would become her favorite inspiration terrain through numerous stays. Discovered by François Louvel of the Flarts Gallery (www.flarts.fr), her paintings, a mixture of sand and oil, appear like framed Japanese gardens: sober landscapes finely combed, describing curves as undulating as they are soothing. Deeply in love with absolute freedom, she refuses to name her paintings, allowing the visitor “full independence” while entrusting them with the responsibility of a potential title.
Like those she must have met during her long journeys, limitless horizons suggest clear visions of the world where one can finally, as she says, “breathe without thinking.” The sand, a material systematically used like an obsession, reminds her of her childhood. It poorly resists being contained: “Evacuate rather than enclose,” confirms the artist. Carol Bruton recalls lingering on sites, clandestinely taking this material used to build the walls of provincial houses around the Spanish capital. The limited use of colors, “two or three only,” she specifies, is also meant not to “corner the gaze” but rather to confuse with their mixing. An atmosphere all the more airy because the painter has deliberately excluded any interior representation, likely due to a lack of luminosity, compounded by her discomfort in the absence of volume. Here, she found the light and contrasts she admits she needed for contemplation, which, like Matisse, seem to have definitively sealed her fate in Nice.
Two views of the Roman Coliseum offer a rare mix of particularly bright red without being aggressive, surprisingly blending with an ocher with golden reflections of purity worthy of desert sands. A confusion of memories and impressions but a more than warm harmony in return.
Slightly dissonant, but who would be surprised, a landscape of the Corsican Balagne, near Montemaggiore, marked by accents of a denser, more rustic but certainly more authentic green, as can be found in the garden of the Isle of Beauty.
Since her return to the urban furnace, Carole Bruton has been moved by the ecological deterioration of our environment. She has just completed what she calls a “mix” which she has, deviating from her habit, named “Comic Space.” A kind of stray piece of lunar territory by its cosmic bluishness or a detached part of one of Iceland’s areas where NASA sent its future astronauts for training. As sad as a land eroded by the sea, as arid as land scorched by pollution, this surface now rough yet attracts a compassionate and gentle hand from the artist.
Even settled on the Coast, Carol Bruton lets her paintings travel the wide world. Another of her “mixes” is exhibited in one of the prestigious galleries on King’s Road in London. Meanwhile, a book published in the British capital “At Home with Art” by Tiddy Rowan (Quadrille Publishing 2006) mentions several of her works. After New York, London, and Monaco, Carol Bruton seems determined to finally settle once and for all in the Bay of Angels. We will hardly complain about it.
jlvannier@free.fr
Photos: Xavier Grimaldi (grimaldi.xavier@wanadoo.fr).
