Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s swimming pool mosaic is the latest addition to the site-specific ‘Artists at Le Sirenuse’ collection of Amalfi Coast hotel Le Sirenuse.
June 3, 2024 (Positano, Italy) – Based at Le Sirenuse, an iconic family-run luxury hotel in the Italian coast town of Positano, the Artists at Le Sirenuse program presents its most ambitious commission to date: a makeover of the hotel’s iconic pool by one of today’s most dynamic and talked-about contemporary artistic talents, Nicolas Party.
Working in mosaics for the first time, Swiss artist Party has created an exuberant play of overlapping and interlocking organic forms that distils the view of sea and mountains from Le Sirenuse’s poolside terrace into a joyous, billowing aquascape that shifts and dances underwater. Due to be unveiled in Spring 2024, Party’s work is the eleventh addition to the hotel’s ongoing series of site-specific series of commissions curated by art advisor Silka Rittson-Thomas, which comprises works by Martin Creed, Stanley Whitney, Rita Ackermann, Alex Israel, Matt Connors and Caragh Thuring, among others.
The project began, Party recalls, in a very natural way, through the “human connection and friendship” of a group of people – Le Sirenuse’s co-owners Antonio and Carla Sersale, Artists at Le Sirenuse curator Rittson-Thomas, Swiss designer Marie Lusa, her gallerist partner Gregor Staiger (Galerie Gregor Staiger), and the artist himself. ‘It was a very family-based, collegial approach, which I found great,’ Party comments. The artist spent a week at Le Sirenuse absorbing the genius loci and talking the project through with the owners of Le Sirenuse, the Sersales, and the curator – who points out that this commission was something of an exception to the rule that has been followed by the hotel’s site-specific art programme ever since its inception in 2015. Rittson-Thomas explains: ‘Generally, when an artist first visits the hotel, they’re pretty much given carte blanche – within reason – on what the work will be and where it will be placed, but in this case, we knew it had to be the pool, and we knew also that the material should be mosaic.’
Antonio Sersale remembers vividly his first encounter with Nicolas Party’s work at a solo show in 2019: ‘I loved the way he was able to create a whole world, I loved the way he combined playfulness with attention to detail. It struck me then that it would be wonderful to ask him to reimagine the swimming pool of Le Sirenuse. When you enter a pool, you are entering another world, a watery realm that becomes even more rich and strange here on the hotel’s terrace, suspended magically between sea and sky.’
As for the choice of the mosaic medium, this had to do with Antonio’s wish to respect the vision of his late father Franco Sersale, a collector and aesthete whose design flair and passion for art and antiques lies behind the elegant ambience of Le Sirenuse as guests experience it today. One of the four Neapolitan siblings who decided to turn their family’s holiday villa into a small hotel back in 1951, Franco transformed Le Sirenuse’s pool, which had been created on the hotel’s panoramic terrace in the mid 1970s. First, in the mid 1980s, he asked Positano- based designer Raimonda Gaetani to add a mermaid mosaic to the small pergola at the eastern end, a work that alluded to the shell grottoes of Italy’s great Baroque villas. Then, in the early 1990s, he had the pool itself entirely relaid in mosaic tiles, with a frieze running around the edge reproducing the border of a Greek-style floor mosaic from the second century BC that had impressed him in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum. ‘So, when we asked Nicolas to create a mosaic for a pool that was starting to show its age,’ comments Antonio, ‘we were really just carrying forward a tradition inaugurated by my father almost forty years ago.’
Back in his New York studio, Party began to ‘walk through a few different ideas.’ Rather than reaching for the decorative motifs or trompe l’oeil still lifes of the Ancient Roman tradition, Party opted for an abstract pattern, explaining that ‘in a hotel that is already pretty perfect, I didn’t want the pool to stand out too much... I wanted it to look like a pool.’ For the same reason, he chose (with a couple of striking exceptions) a blue-green colour palette for the overlapping wave-like shapes that swirl across the pool’s floor and climb its walls. But are they really waves? Party admits that he conceived them as ‘clouds... but obviously clouds reflect in the water and cloud the water, so there's like a kind of connection between those clouds and the water movements.’ In the centre of the pool’s deepest section, he placed a disc made of golden mosaic tiles that, he says, ‘people will think of as the sun, because it’s gold and a circle... so when you jump into the pool, you’re jumping into the sky.’ Party has painted mountainscapes in the past with similarly overlapping forms, and he enjoys the idea that the meld of land, water and sky in these works provokes a kind of fertile confusion in the viewer. ‘It’s very inspired by ancient Chinese landscape painting,’ he reveals, ‘it's very metaphorical and symbolic. Are they mountains? Are they clouds? Or are they like waves or smoke? Are those pink patches glimpses of a forest fire?’
Having created a finished sketch for the pool in his go-to medium, pastel, Party was then faced with the challenge of translating his vision into mosaics. Italy’s leading glass mosaic firm, based near Vicenza, Bisazza was established just five years after Le Sirenuse, in 1956, and like Le Sirenuse, is still owned and run by its founding family. Over the years, the company has worked with a host of leading designers and artists, from Piero Fornasetti to Patricia Urquiola, from Sandro Chia to Hiroshi Sugimoto. They produce mosaic tiles or ‘tesserae’ in a dizzying range of shapes and hues. In the 20mm format, Party had around 200 colours to choose from – far less than the number offered by the pastels he stores in the famous cubby holes that hang on the wall of his studio. Party was keen to be in control of the entire creative process. So, he asked the company to send him their proprietary software, spent a few days learning how to use it, and set about translating his pastel model into a full-scale template for Le Sirenuse’s pool, mosaic tile by mosaic tile. ‘It was really great,’ Party enthuses, ‘because I discovered a totally new way of drawing with software... it was a lot of fun!’
At the Bisazza headquarters near Vicenza, Party’s digital template was reproduced on hundreds of sequentially numbered square sheets, each 15 tiles long and 15 tiles wide. These were then shipped to Positano, where in January 2024, the Fabrizi brothers, Luciano and Marcello, began the painstaking task of laying them. Born in Frosinone, south of Rome, the brothers are today among only a handful of expert Italian mosaicisti. They learned their trade from their father, a builder and tiler who himself carried out several mosaic commissions in the 1960s and 1970s.
Party is, he says, ‘super-excited’ about his contribution to the Artists at Le Sirenuse programme. But the artist also admits to a little pre-inauguration stress because, he says, ‘a lot of the things I make are temporary installations... but this will stay in place, hopefully, for generations to come. So it had better be good!’
NOTES TO EDITORS:
ABOUT ARTISTS AT LE SIRENUSE:
Launched in 2015, the Artists at Le Sirenuse programme is a continuation, in the contemporary field, of the long- standing cultural remit and passion for collection of the famed Amalfi Coast hotel’s owners, the Sersale family. Under the tutelage of Antonio and Carla Sersale, the programme is curated by British art advisor Silka Rittson- Thomas. As of April 2024, eleven leading international artists have been invited to create works that find a place within the hotel’s busy design scheme. For more information on the programme, visit www.sirenuse.it/
ABOUT LE SIRENUSE:
Le Sirenuse opened in 1951, when the Sersale family turned their Amalfi Coast summer house in Positano into a stylish small hotel. Today the 58-room resort is considered an Italian hospitality icon, though it still retains the intimate, cultured atmosphere of a private home. Showcasing the region’s authentic seasonal produce at scenic La Sponda restaurant, informally glamorous bar-bistrot Aldo’s and the chic little Pool Bar, Le Sirenuse also features a refreshingly contemporary Spa designed by architect Gae Aulenti. Assembled over decades by art and antique collector Franco Sersale, the hotel’s elegant décor today dialogues with a growing site-specific contemporary art collection in its communal areas, while the light-filled bedrooms are havens of dolce vita style. Now as in the past, Le Sirenuse is a family affair. Third generation Sersales, Aldo and Francesco, are increasingly involved in the day-to-day running of a hotel that their parents Antonio and Carla began to manage in 1991. Carla currently curates Emporio Sirenuse, the resortwear and lifestyle brand she founded in 2013. For more information, please visit Sirenuse.it/en.
Image Credit:
1. Pool, 2023-2024 by Nicolas Party. Glass mosaic tiles. 18.6x4.65m. Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich_Milan. (C) Nicolas Party. Photography by Brechenmacher & Baumann.
2 + 3. Left. Pool, 2023-2024 by Nicolas Party. Glass mosaic tiles. 18.6x4.65m. Courtesy the artist & Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich_Milan. (C) Nicolas Party. Right. Pool, 2023-2024 by Nicolas Party. Glass mosaic tiles. 18.6x4.65m. Courtesy the artist & Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich_Milan. (C) Nicolas Party. Photography by Brechenmacher & Baumann.
4 + 5. Left. Pool, 2023-2024 by Nicolas Party. Glass mosaic tiles. 18.6x4.65m. Courtesy the artist & Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich_Milan. (C) Nicolas Party Right. Work in Progress_Le Sirenuse x Nicolas Party Pool_Photography by Roberto Salomone.
6. Pool, 2023-2024 by Nicolas Party. Glass mosaic tiles. 18.6x4.65m. Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zurich_Milan. (C) Nicolas Party. Photography by Brechenmacher & Baumann.