François Halard at Design Parade Toulon

François Halard exhibits photographs at Design Parade

"Suite Méditerranéenne"
June 29 - September 24, 2017
Musée d’art de Toulon, 113 boulevard Général Leclerc

This is the first time that François Halard has brought together his photographs taken around the Mediterranean, drawing upon an Ariadne’s thread which does not reach as far as Crete, but stretches from Mallorca to Capri by way of Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Toulon, Roncocesi, Bomarzo, Rome and Gaeta. This itinerary draws the contours of a genuine tropism, developed by a photographer who for years has lived and worked far more across the Atlantic than on the shores of the Roman Mare Nostrum, yet he has continued to return here for ever more advanced explorations. From 1998, the villa Malaparte has existed for him not only as a bedroom with a view (of the Faraglioni), but also the beginning of a more personal work. The villa Curzio Malaparte, that of Contempt, what more did she have to say beyond “Yes, I love you totally, tenderly, tragically”? François Halard looks at the villa like he would a woman, he shows some of her history — but coyly —, lingers over her sculptural curves, reveals her weariness, whilst lauding her noblesse. Villa Malaparte served at once as a developer and a laboratory, and it highlighted that which François Halard would continue to search for in the Mediterranean: the point where a Roman emperor and a modernist architect meet — Tiberius and Adalberto Libera —, a sometime fascist Italian author and a filmmaker at the height of his art — Curzio Malaparte and Jean-Luc Godard —, the intimate and the universal. And then, cinema.