STATEMENT:Château La Coste,Provence

On the occasion of Claude Lévêque’s solo exhibition “Aube bleue” which opened today in Château La Coste, I recalled our visit in this vineyard located between Le Puy Ste Réparade and Aix-en-Provence. After our visit to Hamburg and the WAI (Wood Art Institute), that we visited it before even its owner, the art collector Rik Reinking, started to repair it. He had taken the keys a few days before our visit and was telling us about his plans, dreams and desires, in the first room he had rudimentary prepared as an office, with plenty of coffee, sweets and a lot of heat, to balance the cold of February. Château La Coste near  in the Provence countryside, next summer, was a similar paradise on earth, because, a vineyard in the countryside of Provence, combined in the most harmonious way, wine, art and architecture. The Japanese Architect Tadao Ando, in the vineyard created an Art Center with a bookstore and restaurant, using his signature elements to create an extraordinary experience of light and space in nature. As the administrators told us,  artists and architects were invited to visit the Domain and discover the beauty of Provence. In turn, they were encouraged to choose a place in the landscape that spoke directly to them and were given the freedom to create in situ an artwork. The artist that have exhibited or created a site specific artwork from 2005 till now are: Sean Scully, Lee Ufan, Ai Weiwei, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tracey Emin, Giuseppe Penone, Jeppe Hein, JR, Callum Innes, Etel Adnan, Tony Berlant, Jean Prouvé & Richard Rogers, Sophie Calle, Thomas Dozol, Cy Twombly, GUGGI, Per Kirkeby, Jean Prouvé, Rencontre Photos – Puy-Sainte-Réparade, Paul Mathieu, Tadao Ando, Rieko Tamura, Michel van der Aa, Taizo Kuroda, Don McCullin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Yoshitomo Nara, Liliane Tomasko, Exposition collective, Conrad Shawcross, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Trina McKillen, and Claude Lévêque (27/9/20-Spring 2021) -Efi Michalarou