She's on the move

I arrived in Krasnodar on Saturday, at midnight. I'm going to spend 4 weeks there for an internship.

While strolling around the city, I saw these two monuments which took me back to last year's internship when I translated articles about the monuments of Krasnodar.

Life comes full circle sometimes.

I arrived in Krasnodar on Saturday, at midnight. I'm going to spend 4 weeks there for an internship.

While strolling around the city, I saw these two monuments which took me back to last year's internship when I translated articles about the monuments of Krasnodar.

Life comes full circle sometimes.

[...] Le collectif Cercle Rouge se définit lui-même comme “la première plateforme de financement participatif exclusivement dédiée à l’art“. Et c’est par ce biais, grâce à la solidarité des internautes qui leur a permis de récolter de nombreux dons, que le groupe est parvenu à acheter de l’affichage publicitaire en masse… suffisamment pour occuper cet espace avec des œuvres d’art et offrir un peu de répit aux usagers des transports, “le temps d’une respiration visuelle“. Certes, dans le cas des affichages de Montpellier, les œuvres ne sont restées en place que pour une durée limitée, le temps d’une petite semaine à peine. Mais le collectif souhaite renouveler l’expérience à Paris, et cette fois-ci, en se faisant appuyer par les pouvoirs publics ! 

On Sunday I went to the Chapelle et Pharmacie de la Miséricorde as well as 3 museums : 

Le Musée du Vieux Montpellier

Le Musée Fabre

Le Musée des Arts Décoratifs

I loved everything, especially the musée Fabre who is a really big museum compared to the other two. I might have spent an hour and a half or more just walking around in the building. There were a lot of sculptures and paintings that I loved. 

Today (Tuesday) I went downtown again to see two exhibits. The first one was a really small one showcasing Jean-Paul Bocaj’s art. The man is actually from Montpellier! :) I really like what he does, it’s very striking and the contrasts between all those colours and the usually pretty cramped background is pretty nice. The fact that it was a really small exhibit and that his paintings are really big made quite the impression on me.

I really liked these paintings: 

Les Trois Grâces (the one he did for the exhibit has a different background, it’s not just white) 

Je boirais du lait quand les vaches mangeront du raisin 

I really liked the use of the background as a way of just putting a bunch of different faces and objects. Sometimes it’s just flowers but in some other paintings, the backgrounds hides Dali’s face or Beyoncé. It’s just really fun and you can tell this guy has lots of fun painting.

Right after that I went to see Elina Brotherus’s photos. The venue was quite big so there were a lot of her pictures there. At the very beginning I kind of didn’t like what Brotherus did. I just didn’t quite get the appeal, but I think it’s because the very first pictures shown are auto portraits and it seemed kind of vain to just take pictures of yourself (and yourself only... I don’t want to say selfies but that’s what this is). As the photos went and as I walk through the exhibit I became more and more enticed by her work. I fell in love with some of her pictures. She did and still does a huge number of selfies auto portraits but she also has some exquisite pictures of nature and just landscapes in general. The overall theme was light and I have to say that she uses light in a very nice way. It’s always kind of cold, strangely, and maybe here too the venue changed my perception of the art (because I gotta admit, it was freezing in there). The part f the exhibit about her infertility was really sad. She took pictures from the start of the treatments she tried in the USA (which marked her body) to the end where she finally mourned an unborn angel. That was heartbreaking. 

Anyway, so, I really like her work now. She took pictures in France too so, that was kind of funny to see her pictures where you have all those French words scribbled like “ la chaise, la porte, le sol “ as a way for her to remember the vocabulary.

Here are some of Elina’s pictures I really liked :

Pool Night

Der Wanderer 3

Fuji-mi 2