Open and free to the public all year round, the sculpture garden of the Châteauvert Contemporary Art Centre is hosting three of Elias Kurdy’s Cerberuses for one year.

These works revisit and transform the mythological figure of the guardian of the Underworld. In place of Cerberus’s three howling heads, three fully blossomed bouquets emerge. The monster, stripped down to a motionless whiteness, seems to have lost its original function: no more fangs, no blazing gaze — only blooms that disarm its former fury. Once responsible for keeping wandering souls at the threshold of the realm of the dead, Cerberus becomes here a paradoxical creature: its floral heads no longer threaten, they watch.

Born in Damascus in 1990 and now based in Marseille, Elias Kurdy first studied architecture before training at the School of Fine Arts. His practice, nourished by history and fiction, plays with illusion and imbalance. Blending sculpture, drawing and traditional materials, he revisits classical heritage to question what we choose to pass on — and what may be lost.

One of the finest open-air collections of contemporary art, the Philippe Austruy Collection is home to more than eighty sculptures presented in a veritable Provencal setting, between a remarkable garden, a vineyard landscape and an unspoilt forest. In the heart of the historic center of this centuries-old site, the art center houses the collection's masterpieces.

Offering a breathtaking immersion in the art of the 20th and 21st centuries, the constantly evolving Philippe Austruy Collection not only features the great names of the art world (Frank Stella, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Carsten Höller, Joana Vasconcelos, Bertrand Lavier, Olga de Amaral, Ugo Rondinone, Bernar Venet, Jesús-Rafael Soto... ), but is also committed to the contemporary art scene, inviting artists to design works especially for the estate (Daniel Buren, José Yaque, Gloria Friedmann, Felice Varini, Loris Cecchini...).

Italian artist Hilario Isola, who lives and works between Turin and Bagnolo, presents a group of works brought together for the first time as a gallery of singular presences. Drawn from existing series (I Mani, I Filosofi, The Scientists, Aruspice) and enriched by new pieces created in resonance with the agricultural and natural context of Provence Verte, they reveal a central thread in his practice: the face as a threshold, a sensitive interface between what we see and what, in turn, looks back at us.

Unfolding in a subtle chiaroscuro, the works remain at the edge of the visible. They seek neither spectacle nor immediate recognition, but rather call for attention, establishing a true reversibility of the gaze, echoing the thought of Georges Didi-Huberman. More than a sequence of portraits, the exhibition proposes a shifted experience of looking, where matter, memory, and landscape enter into dialogue. Rooted in duration and in the slow transformation of materials, Isola develops an art of quiet presence, in which seeing also means accepting to be seen.

The exhibition explores the pagan origins of carnival, from Rome to Ancient Greece, then moves on to major European celebrations such as Venice and Binche, before concluding in Latin America with the legendary Rio Carnival.

In total, 140 works — including historical pieces, contemporary installations, artistic creations and multimedia displays — make up this journey. A scenography by Carole Dekens, enhanced with soundscapes and film excerpts, immerses visitors in the energy of these festivities, with a clear ambition: to give the feeling of taking part in a carnival.

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: “The carnival is not, properly speaking, a festival given to the people, but one that the people give to themselves.”