INN AND ART: The Artful Traveler
ARTnews, September, 1998

"People come to Provence for whatever it has to offer," says Pierre Jaccaud tout simplement, "and we are in the basket."

We, in this instance, is anything but simple - and anything but regional. It's what Jaccaud and his wife, Kamila Regent, an Iron Curtain Polish refugee and former gallerist, call their "chambre de sejour avec vue" - or "room with a view." In pursuit of a few days' escape last October, my wife and I were rummaging innocently through the "basket" in a rented car when we happened upon them in precisely the way these two enthusiasts would wish: by accident.

The mountains of the Luberon, a national park to the west of Arles and Avignon, are famous as much for their natural beauty as for the lavender which is cultivated in great mauve banks along their slopes. Perched on a ship's prow of a rock high above the town of Apt, the lovely medieval village of Saignon was bereft of tourists when we came upon it in the late Fall, and seemed untouched by the years. Yet descending into it from the wild landscape above and parking at the outskirts of the village - avoid those twisting, narrow streets at all costs! -- we ran almost immediately into the twentieth century.

The enclosed orchard was the first sign. Peeking over its wall, we noticed two anomalies amongst the fruit trees: first, a little group of Calderesque bronze circus figures gathered under a venerable old tree at the center (we discovered later that they were the work of Polish sculptor Andre Wrona); and second, the odd, theatrical placement of huge terra cotta urns in a clearly intentional play on neo-classical conventions, a post-modern landscape fantasy in the most traditional of settings. Curiouser and curiouser. Starting down the main street, we glanced through a window to glimpse a sparse white space installed with what looked like contemporary minimalist paintings. Surely not? Once curiosity overcame social inhibition, however, we stopped to gawk in another window, and were embarrassed to find ourselves intruding on a family lunch. Waving an apology, we were about to move on when the front door opened and we were beckoned inside: "Entrez, entrez!"

Pierre and Kamila - it seems discourteous to refer to these friendly enthusiasts by their surnames - were concluding a festive lunch for a visiting artist at the family dining table. Their sixteenth-century home, we discovered over coffee and cakes, is what they call an "association d'art contemporain," - part gallery, part breeding ground for new ideas about art, part Bed and Breakfast hostelry, part retreat for artists' residencies, and part publishing center. Offered a tour, we followed Pierre through the three-story building which the couple have restored with quiet respect for its historical dignity, but also with a provocative 1990s eye for architectural space and the offbeat sense of color that Pierre brings to the project from several years in avant-garde theater, film, and television set design.

What strikes the visitor most is the care and quality of the renovation, for which specialist craftsmen were hired to follow Pierre's designs. The large lower rooms are converted into the sparsely furnished, white-walled spaces we had seen from the street, where the couple install paintings and sculptures in a quasi-conventional "gallery" setting, and where they recently exhibited the work of Argentine painter Julio Silva. Take the narrow stairway, however, and you'll find three guest rooms bordering a long corridor, their limestone walls colored with deep, natural rusts and ochres, each furnished with the "comfort and simplicity" of a reductive aesthetic eye: "new linens," Pierre points out, "but traditional furniture in wood and metal." Each is enhanced with a minimum of art, a painting or two, perhaps, and a small free-standing or shelf-mounted piece of sculpture, placed with an aesthetic precision that suggests it was created especially for that place - though with the exception of one etched mural piece by Belgian artist Koen Theys, this work too is for sale: Some of the guests are established collectors who are beginning to come from places throughout Europe, and Pierre and Kamila fully intend that "lightning will strike" more casual visitors with the collecting bug through the delight of sharing space with it during their stay.

Each room has a renovated bathroom opposite, with Provencal tiled floors and walls in rich hues of azure blue and purple, and beyond, at the end of the corridor, is one of the three spaces which has been redesigned as spacious loft quarters for visiting artists. "Its not a hotel," Pierre insists as he leads the way up where the stairway narrows again, twisting toward a new surprise, a third floor landing with more rooms, more eccentric spaces, and more art. "This is a place of passage, a crossroads, where we try to promote ties between artists and creative spaces." He leads the way outside, through the orchard, to yet another guest studio, a small converted barn, explaining their intention to open this garden up soon to artists for site-specific works.

It may not be a hotel, but it is a successful guest house which can accommodate up to eight guests, and whose proceeds support the less commercial aspects of the venture. The enterprising owners first met in a Brussels cafe, at a creative meeting on the Werner Herzog film they were both working on. Arriving late, says Pierre, "I sat down opposite Kamila, convinced that she would become my muse." But it was not until 1993, in the course of a mountain hike, that they stumbled on Saignon. The house was being sold by a Swiss family who had purchased it on the proceeds of the sale of a Goethe poem, found in the correspondence of an ancestor - an omen which was clinched for Pierre and Kamila by the discovery that the poet Julio Cortazar had also lived here. They bought it with the vision of an alternative to the city gallery scene in which Kamila had been involved since arriving in the West. Born in 1957 in Gdynia on the Baltic Sea and educated there, she was enrolled in masters studies in art history at Warsaw before emigrating in 1988. Her first work in the West was in restoration, but she soon opened the Kamila Regent gallery in Brussels, where she showcased Polish contemporaries for three seasons. But since they have been in Saignon, she says, "I've been finding a real balance between the creative impulse and its place in the everyday. Instead of sitting behind my desk as I did in Brussels, here I talk art and show art as I'm cooking and working in the garden." The principal preparer of food for guests, she loves to use the fresh vegetables she grows in her kitchen garden, and rustles up a hearty bouillabaise or roast boar in season. "She's the finest Polish Provencal cook I know," boasts Pierre.

At 41, Pierre has an established reputation for his work with sets and costumes in traditional as well as avant-garde theater - including the Comedie Francaise, the Belgian National Theater, the Opera du Nord, and the Avignon Festival. A graduate of the Ecole d'Art et d'Architecture de Marseille-Luminy, he studied, amongst others, with Fluxus luminary Ben Vautier and learned a passion for the cross media work of the likes of John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Robert Wilson. Aside from his commitment to the project at Saignon, he is currently working on a new spectacle, a performance based on the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger's vision of "The Titanic." At the same time, he keeps a daily sketch-book of pastel drawings, "a daily dialogue with the landscape, one view per day," more for the process than the product, since "the landscape seems the same but is different every day, as is my perception of it."

Each partner brings something to the aesthetic of the association. Developing from her interest in neo-expressionists, Kamila's aesthetic is now "much closer to minimalism, but still essentially pictorial." She loves the subtle mathematical progressions of Wlodek Pawlak, for example, and the structured assemblages of painted surfaces by the association's sole American participant to date, Voy Fangor. Pierre's bias toward social intervention and the crossover of media is reflected in the selection of artists like Marcus Kreis, from Germany, the gently subversive French ironist Marylene Negro and her some-time collaborator, Klaus Scherubel. Michel Scarpa, the recipient of Kamila's excellent cuisine on the day of our visit, uses children's playblocks, amongst other cubic media, to create sometimes erotic, interactive wall pieces.

Financially, Pierre says, the operation is self-sustaining and independent of commercial sales, though the price list ranges from 10,000Fr to 500,000Fr. "We do split commission on sales," he says, "but the guest house allows us to take risks." The Paris-based writer Olivier Reneau, an enthusiastic supporter of the enterprise, points out that "the classical gallery system is no longer functioning so well, so we need to invent ways to attract new collectors. But Saignon is also a place which offers reflection for exterior projects, conviviality for interdisciplinary encounters, and above all a new type of structure for the sale of art. No one who spends any time there goes away without discovering the project's soul."

How do they fare, so far from the traditional art centers? "These days," Kamila points out equably, "Paris is no further than the end of the garden." Adds Pierre, "We're purposely displacing ourselves, living outside the world so that the world can come to us." As art publishers whose productions range from artists' postcards to self-portraits on CD-ROM, they reach out into the world and, partly through the efforts of Reneau, who is well connected with the global avant-garde scene, artists are hearing of the enterprise and coming to Saignon. To publicize their efforts, Pierre and Kamila have also participated in international art fairs at Basel, Ghent, and Turin, and plan to be in Chicago in two years. The network of Parisian alternative magazines has been noting their presence, too, and articles about the project and its artists have appeared in such periodicals as Technicart, Blocnotes, and Purple Prose.

Not surprisingly, too, local regional newspapers like Le Provencal have also reported on this new presence in their midst. As for the local inhabitants, after some initial Gallic skepticism, they soon became intrigued with the enterprise. Says neighbor Anne-Marie Provenzano, herself a well-traveled antiques dealer, "The locals were curious at first, they didn't understand it all too well, and they had difficulty believing it could work. It takes a long time to be accepted here." But they approved the restoration of "a great house," Pierre says, "whose shutters had been closed for years," and soon abandoned their aloofness. He recalls the pleasure of watching Marylene Negro sharing a game of boules in the town square with the old locals sporting her "I Love Art" t-shirts.

With a list of ten residents to their credit since May, 1996, including artists from Poland, Germany, Austria, and Japan, Pierre and Kamila are continually casting about for artists to accept the challenge of isolation, simplicity, and contact with nature. Do they have a wish list, all things being possible? "James Turrell," says Pierre, after a moment's hesitation, "and Nam June Paik." Kamila, though, has no hesitation at all: "I'd like to get Jeff Koons," she says. "He makes me laugh."