St. Anne Chapel at Arles

This autumn Arles town council has decided to give carte blanche to the painter and installation artist Adrian Doura.

The exhibition will take place in the Chapelle Sainte-Anne in Arles, a gem of Romanesque art which for several years now has played host to cultural events of this kind.

Adrian Doura’s exhibition presents a group of paintings on the theme of water, life and death entitled "Traverser". This work, which leads visitors around the nave and the chancel, attempts to cast them into an inner space reserved for silence and meditation, all to the accompaniment of a specially composed musical soundtrack which mixes sounds of water with electro-acoustics sounds, by the argentinian composer Daniel DOURA.

Water, contained in a bowl at the centre of the chapel, symbol of life, continuity, perpetual movement and transformation, raises questions about life and death, the past and the present.

All of these encountered ideas are grouped together around this theme and expressed through a subtle work that stimulates the visitor’s senses and emotions.

"This specific space of the Sainte Anne’s Chapel seemed to me as the perfect environment to confront human representation and endless space concretized by the sky, the sea and the horizon.
The spectator is no longer alone in front of the void I paint. He sees the characters represented on the canvas. The game of mirrors and identifications develops a different path to appreciate immensity.
The people on the "Traverser" polyptych are facing vertigo and joy, fulfillment and emptiness, of existence and its absence. They personify those who look at the painting and hold them company in front of the common denominator of life and death."