When in Provence ..... Cathédrale d'Images

You don’t really come to this part of Provence to spend time in museums, galleries and exhibition halls. If you really want to, there is a Lavender Museum, Corkscrew Museum, Bread Museum, a Basketry Museum and even a Truffle Museum, but I’d rather save my money and spend it on a spectacular lunch at a sidewalk café, being a student of the daily ebb and flow of life.

There is one quite spectacular exception to this rule. Nestled in the heart of the Alpilles just below the dramatic town of Les Baux de Provence, an abandonned Roman quarry became a museum of sorts. Today this gigantic limestone quarry is the home to Cathedral d'Images, a multi-media show that uses 50 projectors to convert the walls of the empty cavern into a larger than life canvass. The ceilings, floors and 6 meter high walls become the backdrop to an amazing multimedia show, beautifully synchronised and choreographed to a soundtrack written especially for each exhibit. It is amazing to see how elements in a painting come to life (for example Van Gogh’s scarcrows flying away from the scene below), giving another dimension to the well known paintings.

The current theme of the show is “Gauguin-Van Gogh: Les Peintres de la Couleur”. It aims to show the link between Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh and to analyse their very different ways of using colour. The show touches on the similarities in their careers, including the explosion of colour later on when Gauguin lived in the Pacific Islands and Van Gogh in France.

So, if you want to go a museum while visiting the Vacluse and be overwhelmed with wonder and enchantment, I know just the place!!

  

  

  

  

To visit the website, click here or like their Facebook page.

If you visit their website, it says that due to a court ruling, Cathedrale D'Images is evicted. Not sure why it is saying that since we visited in the last two weeks and the notice has been there for a while. Hopefully it is just a temporary glitch?

Image credits: All photographs by me