Yes, all will be revealed today, but first, we must complete our tour around the Festival’s host towns and take a close look at the remaining six competition entries.
For the first batch of the gardens, see last week’s post where you can also find some more details about this year’s French Riviera Garden Festival.
We start today’s Stage Two in the gardens of the Musee Fragonard in Grasse. “A Hint of Paradise” by Johan Picorit and Ambroise Jeanvoine presents a playful combination of elements that are known from the fantasy gardens of the so-called “art brut” movement, a term that was coined to encompass the diversity of works by provincial amateur artists who compensated for the mundanity of their daily lives with wild flights of the imagination into paradises of the mind.
The second entry on show in Grasse is firmly located on the other, more conceptual end of the Festival’s creative scale. The “Fibre of Art” to which Elodie Cottar and Marion Hintzy allude in the title of their garden is represented by the yarn that connects the material world, the artists and the spectator.
20 kilometres further south in Cannes, the gardens of the Rothschild Villa have, over the years, hosted some of the festival’s most interesting entries. This year is no exception.
The first thing to say about “Complantation / Contemplation” by Catherine Baas and Christophe Tardy is that it is recognizably a garden.
This should go without saying in an event that is called Festival des Jardins, but in fact, Complantation provides one of the few spaces in the competition where you can (and where you are tempted to) actually sit down, rest for a while and “contemplate” a little.
The garden is essentially a conversation between simple geometrical shapes and natural forms. And like every interesting conversation, it contains enough contrast to challenge the mind, but also enough agreement to establish an integrated whole. (Without such an agreement, you have no conversation at all but just angry shouting.)
This simple concept appears to reflect the realization that, after all, there are only so many things that you can express with a few flowers and shrubbery.
The garden also benefits from a restraint in its colour palette which is largely restricted to green and blue. A similar idea also works very well in Folie Folia by Livia De Kolb and Virginie Alexe, which has been inspired by the late work (the paper collages) of Henri Matisse and the blue monochromes of Yves Klein.
Both artists lived on the Riviera for many years, but in contrast to Matisse (who grew up in the North), Klein was a local boy, born in Nice.
Cannes, meanwhile, was to play a particularly significant role in his short life because this was here Klein – at the age of 34 – suffered a series of eventually fatal heart attacks while watching a movie premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.
In the garden, Klein’s “trademark” blue colour provides the link between nature and the man-made world (represented by the textiles) …
… an idea that works particularly well on a sunny day, when the azure of the Riviera sky chimes in with the theme of the composition.
One feature of this year’s Festival is the large number of international entries, but Juan-les-Pins – the beach suburb of Antibes – is the only host town to field two gardens that were conceived by foreign competitors.
“Meeting the Senses”, created by a trio of landscape designers from Finland (Kairi Meos, Heidi Hannus and Svetlana Lavrentjeva), adds a distinctly Scandinavian note to the flavours of China (Monaco) and Italy (a total of 3). The entry uses a bold combination of painting, structures and plants …
… which is then, as the above picture shows, occasionally complemented by picnic baskets and high-heeled shoes which have been deposited there by the petanque players in the always-busy Parc des Pinedes.
I hope that the designers will not mind this interference with their work. It is, at any rate, the inevitable consequence of embedding the Festival in the every-day world of the host towns rather than isolating it in a museum-like space.
The last of the French Riviera garden that we saw – the 13th, to boot – is also the most controversial. It provokes the question: what place, if any, does ugliness have in a garden?
It certainly has a place in “Plastic Dancer” which was designed by a team from the Polytechnic University of Milan headed by Julia Georgi.
The theme of the garden is the sea, more specifically the way it extends over time – and the items that are accumulated along this way which include, if you like it or not, much plastic junk.
“Plastic Dancer”, however, is not all aggressive finger wagging: it also delivers moments of gentle lyricism.
And the winners are …
Yes, there is more than one winner of this French Riviera Garden Festival, because four different juries had been assembled to award a prize of their own.
The press jury went for “Rendezvouz With the Artist” (Menton). The Green Deal Prize for the ecologically most responsible entry (whatever that may be) was won by “Artistic Fibre” (Grasse).
A jury of landscape designers awarded its Prize of Professionals to “A Hint of Paradise” (Grasse.) But there was also an official Grand Jury which had a cash prize of EUR 10,000 to give away.
This prize – a drum roll before we open the envelope – went to …
… “Complantation / Contemplation” at Cannes. Congratulations to Catherine Baas and Christophe Tardy for a well-deserved win.
Practical tips
Finally, a few practical tips for those of you who are planning to see the French Riviera garden exhibits for themselves. In last week’s post, I said that the sites were in easy walking distance from town centres and train stations, but that stands in need of some qualification.
It is unreservedly true for Menton and Juan-les-Pins / Antibes (the Jardin Bioves and the Parc des Pinedes are both a five-minute-walk away from the respective train stations). And if you can find the Casino in Monaco and the giant ferris wheel in Nice (right off the start of the Promenade des Anglais), you will have no problem locating the exhibition sites either.
The Villa Rothschild in Cannes is also easy to find (it features in every city map), but requires a slightly longer walk. We suggest to combine your visit with a kind of city tour, heading (from the station) straight to the beach and then turning right, past famous sights such as the festival centre (the Film Festival, that is, not the Garden Festival) and the yacht harbour.
Use the Chemin de la Nadine to turn inland and, as you cross the main road (called Avenue Picaud), look for the entrance to the Villa Rothschild on Avenue Jean de Noailles, slightly towards your left.
For your return, turn left into Avenue Picaud until you reach the large intersection and cross over diagonally into the Old Town (towards the tower of the Eglise Notre Dame), following the lively Rue Meynardier past the market and much picturesque urban scenery all the way back to the station.
Also note that the train station at Grasse is a long uphill walk away from the town centre, which is why it may be more convenient to come by bus (lines 600 or 610 run frequently from Cannes, right outside the station). Leave the bus at the Honore Cresp stop for a spectacular viewing platform which doubles up as the town’s market square.
The path to the gardens of the Fragonard Museum branches off the first right-hand curve of the Boulevard Fragonard’s serpentine just underneath you.
Due to the one-way traffic system in the Old Town, the buses do not pass here on the way back to Cannes, which is why it is easiest to catch your return bus a short-but-steep downhill walk away at the Marechal Leclerc roundabout.
