Sleeping Like the Sun: Adrien Vescovi Drapes Marseille in Colour
A sheet lifts at its corner, settles, lifts again, catching a colour that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere, the ochre of the building it hangs against, the blue that arrives only when the wind allows it. Six hundred sheets breathe through the arcades of the Centre de la Vieille Charité this summer, and by the time visitors reach the chapel, they have already stopped walking like people who are simply passing through.
Above: View of Adrien Vescovi's studio. Below: Preparatory drawing for the Centre of the Vieille Charité. © Julia Andréone
This is Sleeping Like the Sun, running until 10 January 2027, by Adrien Vescovi. In his studio outside Marseille, vats holding up to 400 litres simmer on burners while sheets are stirred with long wooden spoons, and nobody, including Vescovi, knows exactly what will surface. Yellow does not become red in a single gesture; it passes through states that must be accepted rather than corrected. Two lengths of cloth immersed in the same bath will emerge as strangers to each other. This is not a flaw in his method. It is the method, and beyond the studio it continues without him: hung outdoors, the sheets take on whatever the sky gives them, sun, rain, dust, working into the fibre like a second dyer.
Ville de Marseille, Image: Marcel de Renzis, 1950s, reference 2Fi371, © Marseille Municipal Archives.
That trust in what he cannot control runs deeper than technique. Vescovi works almost exclusively with old sheets, many drawn from family trousseaux, cotton and linen already carrying decades of somebody else's washing, mending, sleeping. He is not covering the Vieille Charité in fabric so much as returning cloth that has already lived once to a building that has already lived several times over. Built by Pierre Puget in the seventeenth century to house Marseille's poor under royal order, the Vieille Charité has since been a barracks and an emergency shelter for families bombed out of the port. Its walls hold that sequence the way Vescovi's sheets hold their former owners, present but unexplained, and felt rather than read.
Sleeping like the sun, Adrien Vescovi. © Marc Domage
Laetitia Olivier, curator of the exhibition and Head of Exhibitions for the Museums of Marseille, has walked this site daily for years. She describes how Vescovi engages the architecture "through contrast: color against the monochrome of stone, movement against immobile structure, lightness against massiveness, fragility against the permanence of heritage."
Part of the installation Sleeping Like the Sun in the chapel of the Vieille Charité. © Julia Andreone.
Inside the chapel, that dialogue becomes immersion: 800 square metres of cotton absorb the studio's colours beneath Puget's baroque dome. Every visitor who walks between the hanging sheets in the arcades shifts the air slightly, leaving a trace the artist could never have painted in himself. Outside, wind and sun continue that work across eight months, so the piece on show in January will not be the piece that opened in May. Nothing here is finished. It is only, for now, visible.
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Further Information:
Sleeping Like the Sun by Adrien Vescovi runs until 10 January 2027, at the Centre de la Vielle Charité, Marseille.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Sleeping like the sun, Adrien Vescovi., © Olivier R.
All further images as credited in captions.