Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 23 August 2018

The Villa Carnignac art gallery is located on a Mediterranean island off the French Riviera called Porquerolles. Purpose-built to show off billionaire hedge-fund executive Edouard Carnignac’s modern art collection, the gallery opened in June. Monsieur Carnignac hung out at the Factory with Andy Warhol in the 1960s, is a freedom-loving, polo-playing child of the counter-culture who famously paid for an advertisement displayed in the leading papers of Europe on the same day urging former president Hollande to lay off taxing the rich. The off-shore location of his art gallery is vitally important. You don’t visit Villa Carnignac because you can’t think of anything better to do on a Wednesday afternoon. You journey there, imbued with a pilgrim spirit. The gallery website puts it like this: ‘As in all legends or initiatory journeys, the voyage to the islands is always a dual crossing, one physical, the other mental. It’s a crossing over to the other side.’

The crossing over to the other side was mental all right. The population density of the French Riviera in August must be right up there with Gaza. A ten-mile traffic jam inched its way to the ferry port, where it was shooed away by a police cordon. I parked the car, eventually and illegally, on a grass verge a mile and a half away and walked back to the ferry terminal, where we queued in searing heat for half an hour to buy ferry tickets, then sat on a ferry until the body of passengers was compacted to the density of a rush-hour Tube train. This monotonous and uncomfortable experience was briefly enlivened by a proper dog fight between a Scottish terrier and an English bulldog which, interestingly, the terrier won.

The spiritual crossing over to the other side took 15 minutes.

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