FLORA MOSCOVICI b. 1985

When she proposes in situ projects, Flora Moscovici looks for starting points and follows them without knowing the final form in advance. She scouts wander, photographs, consults archives, and composes a mental colour chart that will later enable her to find the best shades. Ville Songe, chose to work directly on the concrete walls of the MAMAC terraces, accepting the roughness of the support.

Here, she works with a brush, using different pigment-tinted juices, which she successively rubs into the original monochrome surface. Her painterly gesture is based on highlighting the presence of the hand, not on erasing it. Her large-scale paintings fully assume their processual dimension, their slow ascent, their undoubted trial and error, and their completion far removed from their beginning.

Flora Moscovici knows: that the Côte d'Azur, whose name is in recent use, has made political use of color. Writer Stéphen Liégeard, a native of the Côte-d'Or, coined the term "Côte d'Azur" in his eponymous book (1887): the "blue country", as he also called it, then took on its definitive colour. The imagery of advertising, tourism and political communication followed, making "Azure" or supposedly "Azure" blue a local brand. In Nice, over the years, the colour has been taken over by the narrative, and this is what Flora Moscovici decided to bypass to get a better grasp of it. At MAMAC, she took as her starting point the distinctive hues of the city's architecture. For her, grey concrete with its visible asperities becomes a form of skin, on which she deploys an immense immersive painting. In her research for Ville Songe, the artist looked at the way the city was built, accompanying the exoticism promised to winterers, notably by drawing inspiration from the polychromatic facades of neighbouring Italy. Unlike other places, Nice has invented its picturesque spirit in a composite architectural syncretism based on supposed authenticity.

*Note: No, the Côte d'Azur doesn't start blue. As far as I'm concerned, the Côte d'Azur has always been a deep shade of red. I'd just arrived in Nice and hadn't yet seen the waterfront, so I decided to make a detour to the Cours Saleya flower market. The façade of the church caught my eye, perhaps a little cardboard paste, the ideal incarnation of what I imagined Nice architecture to be. A sign at the entrance told me that this was the chapel of the Confrérie de la Très Sainte Trinité et du Saint Suaire, otherwise known as the Pénitents Rouges. Did I see even one Red Penitent that day? I don't remember, but it's those red robes that are the most colourful reminder I have of Nice today. Having learned that there were also brotherhoods of blue, white or black penitents in the city doesn't change a thing. Nor did the fact that, a few minutes after this discovery, I'd stumbled without warning around a single pillar onto the - albeit very azure - Plage des Ponchettes. The Mediterranean Sea seemed to me singularly dull in comparison to this poppy-hued revelation. I don't know if Flora Moscovici's image of her city is as crayfish-red as mine, but I like to imagine that her title, beyond the sultry epinal images of the Côte d'Azur, also reads in the plural."