Jean Cocteau never really left Villefranche-sur-Mer. He spent formative years at the Welcome Hotel on its seafront, and in 1956–57 he painted the little Romanesque Chapelle Saint-Pierre on the Quai Courbet wall to ceiling—scenes from the life of the fishermen’s patron saint, rendered in his unmistakable charcoal line. The medieval rue Obscure nearby served as a location for his final film, Le Testament d’Orphée. It is that presence—Cocteau’s particular traffic between the rational and the fantastical—that Arne Quinze says he felt “everywhere” when he first walked the town’s ramparts, and that gives this summer’s exhibition its name.
Courtesy of LA CITADELLE.
“The Absurd and the Dreamlike” opens to the public on 20 June and runs through 31 October 2026 at La Citadelle—Villefranche’s 16th-century sea fortress, now an art center and museum. It is a major new project by Quinze, who has taken the unusual step of inviting another monumental imagination, the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, to share the stage. Across the Citadelle’s courtyards and chambers, the two stage what the organizers describe as a single surreal narrative—monumental outdoor installations answered by intimate indoor environments.
A Dialogue Staged in Cocteau’s Shadow
Joana Vasconcelos, “Real Embarcação,” © Jean-Christophe Lett.
The framing is deliberate. Cocteau treated the chapel as a place where the sacred and the everyday could share a wall; this exhibition asks the fortress to do something similar, dissolving the line between history and fantasy until, as the curators put it, every space becomes a living canvas. The pairing of Villefranche’s deep Cocteau lineage with two living sculptors is the show’s central conceit—and its strongest claim on the visitor’s attention.
Two Vocabularies, One Surreal Register
Portrait Duo, Quinze, Vasconcelos, Cocteau, by Dave Bruel.
Quinze and Vasconcelos make an inspired odd couple. Quinze is known for vivid, organic, quasi-botanical sculptures that he plants in public space as an argument against what he calls the “mineralization” of cities—concrete crowding out biodiversity. Vasconcelos comes at scale from the opposite direction: she takes the domestic and the handcrafted—crochet, textiles, household objects—and blows them up into the public realm.
Her signature Valkyries, ongoing since around 2004, are vast inflatable-and-crochet creatures with tentacular limbs, named for the warrior-women of Norse myth and dedicated to women history overlooked; recent iterations have hung from the ceilings of the Guggenheim Bilbao and, in 2023, formed the backdrop to Dior‘s couture show in Paris. Set loose inside a stone citadel, that vocabulary of softness and excess promises exactly the kind of inside-out, intimate-versus-monumental friction the exhibition is built on.
A Refusal of Uniformity
Arne Quinze, “Aecera,” © Dave Bruel.
Arne Quinze, “Assimilate until,” © Dave Bruel.
Quinze frames the project less as a spectacle than as a position. In his statement, he writes that the show was born while Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée played on a loop in his studio, and that the film’s movement “between unsettling reality and mythological symbolism” mirrors his own artistic mission: to defend diversity in a world he sees as drifting toward sameness.
“The Absurd and the Dreamlike is a refusal of that narrowing,” Quinze writes. “Here we present other realities. Here we dream. We experiment. We dare. We choose boldness over conformity.”
“Here we present other realities. Here we dream. We experiment. We dare. We choose boldness over conformity.”
Arne Quinze
It is a romantic thesis—nature as the truest guide, beauty as resistance—and it gives the surrealism on view an ethical undertow rather than mere whimsy.
What’s on View
Joana Vasconcelos, “Dorothy,” ©Jean Christophe Lett.
Arne Quinze & Joana Vasconcelos, “Temple Tetris,” © Jean Christophe Lett.
Visitors can expect monumental sculptures and immersive installations alongside oil paintings, video, and sound works. The exhibition also debuts new collaborative pieces made jointly by Quinze and Vasconcelos—the interweaving of two distinct studios being, on paper, the rarest thing here and the most worth seeing in person.
The Curatorial Hand
Arne Quinze, “Lupine,” © Dave Bruel.
Joana Vasconcelos, “A Jóia do Tejo,” © Jean Christophe Lett.
The show is curated by Selcan Atilgan, founder of the international art consultancy ARTSA, and presented under the direction of Camille Frasca, director of La Citadelle since 2021 and a modern-and-contemporary specialist who previously coordinated the Musée national Picasso–Paris‘s Picasso-Méditerranée program. British curator Clare Lilley — long associated with Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Frieze Sculpture, and a past collaborator of Vasconcelos—joins as Guest Curator, shaping the editorial framework and the principal curatorial texts.
Plan Your Visit
- What: “The Absurd and the Dreamlike”—Arne Quinze and Joana Vasconcelos
- Where: La Citadelle, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France (Art Center & Museum)
- When: 20 June – 31 October 2026 (public opening 20 June)
- Press: RSVP adele@insightcommunications.cc
Joana Vasconcelos, 2023, Exposição “Extravagâncias” no MON, Museu Oscar Niemeyer em Curitiba, Brasil, Artist Joana Vasconcelos, photo by Lionel Balteiro | La Mousse.
Arne Quinze, profile, Riyadh, by Dave Bruel.
