Until Saturday June 4 at the bCarré d’Art library, on the Études wall on the mezzanine floor of the building, is exhibited the diluted but very real dream of Jean-Louis Pagès, an architect in watercolour.
This is a beautiful little exhibition that will appeal to the people of Nîmes as well as to the curious who will go to Carré d’art by chance and discover these soft and sensual watercolors of an almost dreamlike city of the Antonins. After having traveled the world, built, and “watercolored” the places where he passed, the pandemic and the confinement led Jean-Louis Pagès to rediscover Nîmes, the city of his ancestors, where he was not born but where he spent 62 years.
Historic places of course, but sometimes also those created by the architect himself. A book, published by AtelierBaie has since emerged. A text by Isabelle Montfumat introduces the exhibition of watercolors by Jean-Louis Pagès. According to this art critic: After the “Mediterranean Paths” which led him to work in watercolor, Jean-Louis Pagès, traveling architect, transports us into his pictorial universe, associated with personal texts, sometimes intimate, through 30 original watercolors. At the heart of mythologies, surveying the streets, historic places but also the surprises or the creations of the architect, the watercolours, all of the same dimensions, offer us a unit of measurement of the world that touches us, to the point of designating us as privileged witnesses. Only pure emotion is capable of such enchantments. »
« I work on subjects that interest me. I mostly take black and white photos; it allows me to remember places and landscapes, sites, without restoring the reality seen. But contrary to what is recommended for watercolourists, I first draw the main subject with freehand, as I do for my main architectural works, then I write the color on it! It is a job that is done, in a few hours, in its entirety“, explains the artist.
And Isabelle Montfumat to resume: ” This intentional color, which the blue color sported by almost all watercolors, this amazing blue, the « Daler-Rowney » used by William Turner, then produces a new relationship to the narrative. Jean-Louis Pagès thus offers us an almost romantic journey of the city of Nîmes that we see every day, of this surrounding wealth that crosses the centuries with us, forever fixing our heritage images. The architect is not far away! »
Exposed places? First of all, there is a map of Nîmes. Then, in order, Porte Auguste, Place de l’Horloge, Les Halles, Carré d’Art (therefore “the exhibitor on display”, Napoleon, Place d’Assas, Quai de la Fontaine, the Bar Hemingway, the Temple of Diana, the Source, the Tour Magne, the Castellum divisorium, the Couchoux well washhouse, Mont Duplan, the André Malraux centre, Saint-Dominique, the cathedral, the Place du Chapitre, the Rotunda, Juliette, the town hall, the Place du Marché, the impasse Fresque, the Arena, the Puech du Teil residence, the Porte de France, the impasse de la Sariette, the scrubland, the Zup and the Mas de Mingue.
Each text is accompanied by an explanation of the author, the artist, the architect, the child who remembers, the wandering adolescence, the man who lives and relives. Analyzes, details, insights but also feeling and soul. The pitfalls are avoided, the values preserved and the guideline well found.
