For those of us who were regular visitors to La Valette-du-Var, the Moulin had become an important venue for creation.

Underwritten by the municipality and by the energy of its founder, Isabelle Bourgeois, this rather modest space offered exhibitions intended to bring together the preoccupations of contemporary artists with a focus on local heritage, be it social, architectural or historical.

The challenge was a risky one, but the rigor of programming always made it possible to avoid any concessions to the demands of tourism. Thanks to ambitious renovations of the original site, the space has now been transformed into a genuine art center that reopened last June with an exhibition of works by the artist, Alun Williams. Remaining faithful to the initial project as well as to his own practice, Williams developed a genuine “investigation” on the subject of a certain Joseph Gauthier – a truly emblematic historical character in relation to the town’s development. Despite being merely the modest prior of a town that had a population of less than a thousand souls at the beginning of the seventeenth century, this atypical character played an important role by spreading the philosophical and scientific ideas of his time, notably by inviting numerous European thinkers to the town, creating in this way a kind of permanent university. As he often does, Alun Williams explores his subject by using a protocol that is particularly original. Instead of working on a series of portraits that exhibit a degree of resemblance to the subject, the artist embarks on a search of the town in the hope of finding marks that he considers capable of representing the phantom-like faces (he dislikes the term!) of his chosen characters. Then he “applies” this vestige in the form of a paint mark to different landscapes painted to become potential backgrounds for his “portraits”. This process repeats itself on each of the canvases exhibited, thus setting up a strange familiarity with the character that we cannot otherwise see. “I quickly noticed the spectator’s ability to accept a paint mark as being a representation of such a character – the paint mark actually “becomes” the character. I was very interested by the cycle of paintings made by the Australian painter, Sydney Nolan on the subject of the famous bandit, Ned Kelly. In these paintings - dated 1946 -, Kelly’s head is represented by a black square, in reference to a kind of handmade helmet that he wore, according to the legend. This quasi-abstract representation of someone is extremely mysterious. But if you ask an Australian today to sketch Ned Kelly, they will draw a black square on a body!“

Furthermore, Alun Williams has invited other “disappeared stars” to share the walls of the exhibition, as if Joseph Gauthier had himself organized this encounter, riddled with anachronisms. We come across a heroine of the French revolution (Julie Bêcheur), one of the founding fathers of the American nation (John Adams) as well as Jules Verne. No-one can say what mystery brought them together. However, they make it possible to reveal the extent of this artist’s work, summoning history to produce imaginary signs in place of legends. And yet, nothing is more real than these marks that confront us.

Éric Mangion, Nice, 2007
Curator and art critic; Director of the Villa Arson National Contemporary Art