How a Protected Mediterranean Island Became One of France’s Most Compelling Art Destinations

The South of France has been a destination for artists since the golden age of the early avant-garde, but the region has seen, since the pandemic, a proliferation of new foundations and art initiatives that have turned it into a favorite summer destination for art lovers. Among these relatively new organizations, Fondation Carmignac is one of the most charming, set on the magical island of Porquerolles, a protected, largely untouched Mediterranean ecosystem in the middle of the sea. Housed in a beautifully restored farmhouse, the foundation offers 2,000 square meters of exhibition galleries surrounded by 15 hectares of outdoor space inhabited by contemporary sculpture. Open from May through November, the foundation offers visitors an immersive experience of the ambitious, mostly installative and large-scale works by top international artists in Édouard Carmignac’s collection, which now comprises over 300 pieces.

The foundation began as a deeply personal project rooted in a chance encounter, according to his son, Charles Carmignac. Édouard Carmignac first encountered the island and the property in the early 1990s, when he was invited to a wedding at the then-owner’s farm. “He said to the owner, the father of the bride, ‘If one day you happen to sell the place, my dream would be to share my collection there.’ When the owner died in 2013, his daughter remembered my father’s proposal,” Charles said.

Charles became involved in Fondation Carmignac a few years later. At the time, he was still touring with a band. “When you grow up with a father who is obsessed with art, you often reject it. For me, it pushed me toward music,” he shared. “But he was smart in how he integrated me into the project. He invited me to art fairs two or three years before I joined; he let me in progressively.” In fact, he only really familiarized himself with the Porquerolles property as construction was beginning. “I spent some special nights there, almost like spiritual experiences, and that made me connect to my father. I got closer to him and closer to the project. Then we naturally started working together.” Their family structure, he added, is like an ecosystem: one sibling works in finance, another in wine and another in blueberries while he is in art.

Fondation Carmignac officially launched in 2000, but only opened the Porquerolles outpost in 2018. Because the island has been part of Port-Cros National Park since 1985, the building could not simply be remade any which way into a collector’s vanity museum. Ultimately, the museum was built underground and integrated in a sustainable way into the landscape. “It is a national park and a preserved forest surrounded by the sea. There is no construction on the island except for this villa, and the village,” Charles explained.

The architecture is specially designed to counter the feeling of being underground. A stunning water ceiling lets sunlight pass to the subterranean museum, creating the sensation of being just beneath the sea, floating under the sunlight. Visitors are invited to enter barefoot, in small groups of no more than 50, every half hour, allowing for very personal and very quiet encounters with artworks. “People can feel intimidated by contemporary art,” Charles said. “Here the idea is to have a more relaxed relationship to it, as if you had been invited into someone’s house and were seeing his artworks.”

The relationship with the landscape is also central to the foundation’s identity. Landscape designer Louis Benech conceived the garden as a “non-garden,” favoring subtraction and protection over addition, while preserving pioneer and endemic plants, including cistuses, Hyères lavender trees, needle-leaved broom and serapias orchids. Around 20 site-specific works are installed across the site, some produced through residencies and others selected from the collection or brought in as loans. The latest addition is James Turrell’s Skyspace, currently under development and set to rise atop a hill.

Fondation Carmignac’s programming encourages artists and curators to respond directly to the island’s rich ecology and mythology. The collection, according to Charles, is very personal, largely tied to his father’s own biography: his childhood in Peru, the cultural energy of the 1960s and 1970s, his time in New York, his encounter with Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1984 and the 1993 acquisition of Gerhard Richter’s Grüner Strich. “He has always lived with artworks.” He shared how his father started collecting when he was a student in New York, before he started working on Wall Street, but he did not have a lot of money, so his mother, who was a very good draughtswoman, made copies of the artworks he loved. “She would spend months copying them. He always had the desire to live with artworks and then to share them with his colleagues and later with a wider audience.” For the most part, Édouard Carmignac hasn’t relied on advisors; he simply followed his tastes and instincts. “My father has this axis where artworks have to speak spontaneously and immediately. He works very fast at art fairs. If something catches his eye, he can decide quickly.”

This season, the Fondation is presenting “SEA, POP & SUN,” curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer. Inspired by Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Sea, Sex and Sun,” the exhibition invites visitors to enter a seaside dreamworld through more than 80 works, bringing icons of Pop Art—Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Marjorie Strider, Evelyne Axell and Martial Raysse—into dialogue with contemporary artists who extend or challenge this movement, including Derrick Adams, Théo Mercier, Cosima von Bonin and Judy Chicago.

The exhibition, according to Charles, grew out of his father’s desire to activate this part of the collection, which is primarily associated with his years in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, while opening it up to new readings and interpretations. Pop is often linked to cities and advertising, but this exhibition looks to works from the movement shaped by seascapes and West Coast sensibilities, reflecting the hippie, spiritually attuned and ecologically aware culture that emerged during the same period.

Particularly engaging is the way each room’s theme is paired with an iconic song from the era, heard through a localized listening experience centered on the wall text. The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” for instance, inspires one of the first rooms, where a constellation of Niki de Saint Phalle inflatables is suspended from the ceiling, alongside Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl Crying and a painting by the Belgian artist Evelyne Axell. In another room, the California dream is evoked between utopia and construction through The Mamas & the Papas’s 1965 song “California Dreamin’,” in a space dominated by Jeff Koons’s iconic red Lobster inflatable. Joyful scenes of Black gatherings around brightly colored pool floats and flamingos, paired with works by Mario Schifano, Alain Jacquet and Axell, suggest how that dream had already become a mediated construction in the 1960s.

One of the most impressive works in the show is Théo Mercier’s monumental sand sculpture, inspired by the futuristic vision of Zager & Evans’s 1969 song “In the Year 2525.” Shells, body fragments and ancient forms seem to merge organically with industrial objects such as tires, creating an imagination-triggering and dystopically unsettling post-human vision in which nature and industry, past and future, beauty and waste have become inseparably intertwined in an extremely precarious construction.

Another standout, given an entire room of its own, is Miquel Barceló’s expansive canvas, produced on site for Villa Carmignac and inspired by the underwater caves and waters off the island of Porquerolles. The diorama-like work turns the room into an aquarium, enveloping visitors in a lively underwater world of giant squid and other cephalopods floating through space. There is also a remarkable installation by Bruce Nauman, One Hundred Fish Fountain, which transforms another room into a yellow-lit, uncanny aquarium. Bringing together species caught by Nauman and his art dealer, Donald Young, in the Great Lakes region, 97 bronze fish float in the space, each spurting thin jets of water, recalling the boyhood afternoons the artist spent fishing with his father. Alternating between 15-minute sequences of powerful, resonant streams and moments of almost-silent dripping, the installation evokes the continuous cycle of life.

Overall, the show is rich and broad, both in its themes and in the global, intergenerational range of artists included. Yet it is also playful and deeply engaging, allowing a diverse audience to encounter it at multiple levels.

Nighttime is becoming an important part of the foundation’s programming, with some very innovative formulas. A curator has been invited to spend 60 evenings on the island in preparation for a 2027 exhibition devoted to night. Next year, with the inauguration of the night program, visitors will be able to sleep in the garden. “There will be beds and a tree house by Angelica Jansen, and people working on sleep and dreams,” Charles explained.

The foundation’s relationship with the local community wasn’t easy at first. Carmignac recalls that locals were suspicious of a Parisian finance family bringing contemporary art into a protected island environment. To build trust, he spent time in village bars, organized conversations and helped explain that the project would be free for residents and would involve the community. Over time, the foundation created jobs, brought schools from the mainland and contributed to the local economy by extending activity for hotels, restaurants and public services.

Fondation Carmignac today is part of a broader regional art ecosystem. During Covid, it was involved in the launch of “Plein Sud” with Villa Noailles, a network of visual art venues in the region. The goal was to help tourists and art visitors move between cultural sites and discover a wider circuit of foundations, museums and exhibition spaces.

Today, Fondation Carmignac’s audience is quite diverse. Some visitors come just to visit the foundation, especially those from the art world or who are visiting cultural destinations such as Château La Coste. Others come for the island’s beaches and forests, then discover the foundation while there. Charles also discussed how the foundation is increasingly thinking about hospitality, not as a conventional art hotel but as a way to extend the experience between day and night through garden stays and partnerships with island hotels.

Looking ahead, one of the foundation’s goals is to transform the island into a place of creation rather than simply a site of exhibition by developing residencies that let artists spend longer periods on site, allowing new, more context-specific works to emerge from direct contact with the island’s landscape, ecology, history and social life. The James Turrell project is also a major future milestone and could allow the foundation to remain open beyond the summer season.

The foundation is also exploring underwater and marine projects, including works that could interact with fish and help create nesting environments in collaboration with the national park. Charles sees this as part of a broader ambition to create an artistic ecosystem in symbiosis with the island, its inhabitants and its environmental realities. Ecology, of course, remains one of the foundation’s central challenges. “There is a lot of anthropic pressure. The issue is that it is an on-off island. In winter, there is nobody. Once the James Turrell project opens, we will be able to open all year long, which will help dynamize the island.”

Accessibility is another major goal. For those unable to visit the island, the foundation created “Musée Valise,” a portable exhibition designed for hospitals and prisons. Inspired partly by his own experience touring hospitals and prisons with his country-folk band, the project brings real artworks into patients’ rooms and carceral settings, transforming them into intimate exhibition spaces and making the foundation accessible also for those who are not able to visit.

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