LaBel Valette — Pressigny-Les Pins, France
This LaBel Valette Festival mural / installation was painted very quickly as an early addition to a multidisciplinary urban arts festival at the Château de Pressigny-les-Pins.
I arrived very early in the life of this project, while the ‘festival’ was still taking shape. At the time, there were only a few pieces up around the sprawling property. Frustrating train delays earlier in the day left only a meagre four hours to create this installation. Upon arrival, a brief tour of the grounds with festival creator Sebastien Lis massively informed the work.
Château de Pressigny-les-Pins
Built in 1864 by Marie Joseph le Bouëdec, the castle of La Valette was occupied from 1893 by Viscount Albert Isle de Beauchaine and his wife.
The Spanish State purchased the castle from the 1930s to the 1990s and converted it into a boarding school, which explains the presence of dormitories built in the 1970s, where most of the art was created.
Since 2016, the abandoned domain of La Valette has experienced a renaissance. This was due to the Urban Art Paris association and the creators of the LaBel Valette Festival, Mathieu and Sébastien.
INSTALLATION
This work is difficult to describe on paper, and pictures hardly serve justice. The space was completely transformed with multi-layered images based on historical reference, evoking ghosts of the Spanish Civil War and the complex Franco-Spanish relations that seemed to still linger in the warm afternoon air.
Franco’s portrait is the most immediately striking feature, though his likeness is not visible as you first enter the space, seeing (through a short hallway) what appears to be an empty room, with only a broken child’s desk bathed in the bright green light that pours through the lush foliage of old trees surrounding the property.
Upon entering, you’re immediately confronted by the formidable image of the general’s face. A central door, cutting it in half, leads into the long-unused dorm room. Like the Mona Lisa, his expression is enigmatic, evoking both coldness and warmth, like the two sides of a coin.
The walls feature two big hands, held open, imploring the value of work and loyalty to the state. Between these hands, at the foot of the topless window cross, sits the small desk Sebastien and I rescued from a collapsed section of the building. Many children’s daydream doodles cover its surface. One wonders who these children have become, and where now they perhaps most of them lay.
A printed paper fragment of Franco’s propaganda machine (essential to every dictatorship) sits on the table, pulled from one of the many decayed textbooks lying around in long forgotten musty corners.
GENDARMES
As we walked the grounds of the Bel Valette, ‘Les gendarmes’, the bright red and black European firebugs swarmed around us. Their name comes from their fanciful likeness to the uniform of the French military at the end of the 17th century…a far cry from the paramilitary troops now freely roaming the streets of Paris.
Moving back out of the main dorm room, a painted swarm of these insects cut apart the linear planes of the short corridor walls. The bugs infiltrated the closet, shower area, and hallways, representing the final, diminished echo of the military and cultural presence that had long deserted that place.
Special thanks to one of my favorite free spirits on the planet Alla Goldshteyn for putting this thing in action! Find her in Paris if you’re ever there.
