The light that inspires painters
The town of Sète boasts a multitude of painters. Among the most famous are:
- Pierre Soulages (1919-2022). Painter of abstraction and outrenoir, Soulages was born in Rodez and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier. In the 1960s, he fell in love with the Île Singulière and his wife, a Sétoise. From his home-studio on Mount St. Clair, he has enjoyed a great reputation, his works being found by the hundred in the largest museums in the world. From 1987 to 1994, he created the one hundred and four stained-glass windows at Conques Abbey. The Musée Fabre in Montpellier devotes an entire room to his work:
- Robert Combas (1957). A Sétois at heart, Robert Combas was born in Lyon but has remained closely linked to Sète since childhood. He grew up there and drew inspiration from it. An artist of international renown, he is, along with Hervé Di Rosa, at the origin of the figuration libre movement. His brother Marc, alias Topolino, is also an artist, a prolific draughtsman and a well-known figure among Sétois, whom he likes to sketch in his notebooks from the terrace of a bar, the edge of a quay or the dining room of a restaurant;
- Hervé (1959) and Richard (1963) Di Rosa. A painter and traveler, Hervé Di Rosa, creator of the figuration libre movement, remains deeply attached to his home town of Sète. His works are everywhere, on TV (with the series Les Renés) and above all in his museum, the MIAM, which he created with Bernard Beluc. A musician and sculptor, Richard began by bringing his brother Hervé's characters to life, before creating his own sculptures;
- André Cervera (1962). A contemporary painter, he lives and works in Sète. Some describe his painting as Latin Expressionism, a style that translates into thought in motion, crossed by numerous influences. Already in his early days in the 1980s, André Cervera was in search of a total art combining poetry, music and painting. For almost thirty years, he has been a regular visitor to Africa, India and China. Based on his productions, he enriches the expressiveness of his technical resources and cross-fertilizes them with his own imagination.
Figuration libre
In 1981, two young artists from Sète, Robert Combas and Hervé Di Rosa, exhibited in Paris with Rémy Blanchard, François Boisrond, Jean-Charles Blais and Jean-Michel Alberola. While they title their exhibition "Finir en beauté", Ben (an emblematic figure of the Nice School) calls this movement figuration libre. A new movement in contemporary art was born. Sète was proud of its children. The free figuration draws in the rock, the punk, the mass media, the comic strip, the advertising or the urban graffiti to invent a new form of art, free and anticultural. The artists claim to belong to a popular, mass urban culture. Their supports are cans, posters, packing boxes... It is impossible to dissociate Sète from Combas or Di Rosa, their works are everywhere and easily recognizable: raw or naive characters very colored, very comic in the spirit.
Art in the open air
From the beaches to the quays of downtown Sète, from Mont Saint-Clair to the train station, via the Quartier haut and the town's entrances: on the Île singulière, art is on display everywhere in the public space. The city is dotted with sculptures and installations: Le Jouteur en marbre pont de la Civette, La Fontaine du Pouffre opposite the town hall, Les Daurades miroirs à la plagette, La Madone place de l'Hospitalet... More than twenty works can be admired in the port city, along the quays, at the bend in the road or on the waves.
An open-air museum (MACO), over the years Sète has also become one of the French capitals of Street Art. Every year, during the K Live Festival, artists come to express their talent on the walls of this singular city. These works, created by renowned artists, are then displayed for passers-by to marvel at. The tourist office offers a guided tour of these murals.
Movie set
In 1929, Jean Gourguet shot his film L'Escale in Sète, Julien Duvivier followed in 1937 with Pépé le Moko, and Agnès Varda immortalized a typical Sète neighborhood with La Pointe Courte in 1955. And that's just for starters, for Sète and the cinema have had a love affair for almost a century. Since the 1920s, the town has seen the likes of Jean Gabin, Brigitte Bardot, Yves Montand, Romy Schneider, Catherine Deneuve, Richard Anconina, Gérard Darmon... as well as actors from the new generation such as, more recently, Nekfeu, Ingrid Chauvin and Alexandre Brasseur. While it's impossible to count all the films shot in the archipelago, there have been almost a hundred made in the beautiful Languedoc sunshine.
Not only films, but also TV series, such as Demain nous appartient and Candice Renoir. It's not uncommon to come across a film set on a street corner or on the beach.
Finally, from Sète to the surrounding vineyards, several not-to-be-missed events celebrate the seventh art: the Cinéma de la mer, the Sun Sète festival and the Emmuscades.
For example, here are a few films shot locally:
Les Promesses dangereuses (1956) by Jean Gourguet
Babette s'en va-t-en guerre (1959) by Christian-Jaque
La Soupe aux poulets (1963) by Philippe Agostini
Césaret Rosalie (1972) by Claude Sautet
Touchepas à mon copain (1976) by Bernard Bouthier
L'Union sacrée (1989) by Alexandre Arcady
Le Petit Criminel (1990) by Jacques Doillon
Gaspard et Robinson (1990) by Tony Gatlif
Mima (1991) by Philomène Esposito
La Graine et le Mulet (2007) by Abdellatif Kechiche
Face à la mer (2010) by Olivier Loustau
Vraismensonges (2010) by Pierre Salvadori
Coup d'éclat (2010) by José Alcala
And many more..
A look at the archipelago
Each year, the documentary photography center ImageSingulières invites - among other activities - a photographer to take up a residency in Sète and around the Etang de Thau. This immersion lasts six to eight weeks, during which the artist has carte blanche to produce a creative work, to look at the territory and its inhabitants.
For the past fifteen years, at the end of spring, the ImageSingulières festival has been offering a lively photographic program around the archipelago with exhibitions, workshops, meetings, screenings, guided tours..
