Ride and Create : Anne Pesce

Anne Pesce - Crossing the Landscape

For over 15 years, Anne Pesce has been repeating the same ritual every day. Whatever the season, whatever the weather, just before 6am, when day is barely breaking or is still completely dark, she leaves her apartment on her bike to climb the Col de Vence. ‘The exercise is an established habit, almost automatic’ she says. Every day she does this.

After completing a small warm-up loop on the flat, her route passes the Fontaine de la Foux, the water source well known to cyclists in the vicinity, where she stops to refresh before embarking on the 650 meters of ascent.

The Col de Vence culminates at 963 meters, its length a little less than 10km. Some passages have almost a 9% gradient. With few trees, the climb does not offer the slightest passage in the shade, and so the locals carefully avoid the Col de Vence in summer. And also early in the morning when Pesce appears here. But the view of the coast from Nice to Antibes is breath-taking for anyone, and this climb remains a mythical pass around Nice.

Why such stubbornness, why the recurrence of the same exercise tirelessly repeated day after day? By observing and scrutinizing the work and career of Anne Pesce, we may understand her stubbornness more clearly. Cézanne is her father; she says with great humility. And according to Picasso, he is also your father and mine too, if perhaps we could paint.

But Paul Cézanne’s approach to painting inspires Pesce fundamentally, deeply. despite them not actually being biologically related. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, like the master of Post-Impressionism from Aix-en-Provence, she cultivates such a rite to visit Col de Vence each day. Cézanne the solitary went every day to the Sainte-Victoire mountain, seeking pictorial gestures to express the concave, the convex; the cones and the cylinders, of these natural forms which fascinated him.

It gave him the vigour to touch the canvas and to reconvene the colour of the air, its thickness on which depends its tones, discovering the true palette of Sainte-Victoire.

‘I like to observe the light and its variations, but also the feeling of the cold and the rain on my skin.’

This is the basis of Anne Pesce's painting – a demanding daily repetition of absorbing details and colours she has not known until that moment. Already she has entered her studio when she rides her bike, alone on the slopes of the pass. Already creating, absorbing sensations that she will transfer to the canvas. Anne describes her work as ‘crossing the landscape.’ She defends the idea that everyone's perception of the world is unique, that we don't see the same things. But Pesce also believes these individual experiences are more powerful than we realise, and so must penetrate each fragment of her travels – from Iceland, to the South Pole, to New York and back here on the slopes of the Col de Vence.

From deep observations, this systematic examination of places and the moment when the sun rises in the sky, she chooses to compose with three colours: red, yellow, blue. These three colours are those of the sunrise.

"When I leave early in the morning, I look towards Saint Jeannet, towards the east, everything is a blue so deep that it is black.

As soon as I am towards the southwest it will be the time when little by little the red sky will dye the greens of the plants, slowly the yellow will flood the mineral white of the rocks, and the azure blue will appear. In winter when I arrive at the top of the Col de Vence at 7am, the colours above the sea are beyond belief. They change from year to year, it's hardly noticeable, but I can assure you that they do."

These intoxicating colours, this enchantment of light is why so many artists have gravitated (and often levitated) to the Côte d’Azur. Anne the solitary, who devotes an infinite time to observe, to experience, to absorb. And then comes the time to hurtle down the hundreds of metres of altitude which have been accumulated so dearly.

‘Col de Vence is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32. First there is this music that rises slowly, like me. I climb the pass and then there is this fantastic descent, the descent at full speed, the return to the foot of the mountain.’

Re-entering the town of Vence, the contrast is striking. In a few seconds, the solitude of the altitude gives way to a hive of activity. Anne goes to the old town, takes a bag out of the back pocket to bring back some bread, then goes to her fishmonger ‘a lover of his trade’, to choose the catch of the day, and takes a break with Pierre who runs the grill, and share a coffee with him. Everyone knows her here, she is a regular character.

The Col de Vence is hard, the majority of those who live at the foot of the road have never even experienced its ascent with the strength of their legs.

And now Anne is standing in the calm sanctuary of her studio. In front of the frame of the canvas, she delicately and attentively traces a red circle. It brings back all the sensations, the colours and impacts, the harshness or the softness of the weather, the feelings of the day's outing. A brushstroke reinterprets movement and experience, to offer us a singular view of the world, and take us across the landscape.

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