Jardin Michel Vu
The Exhibitions
When Michel settled in Ghazoua forty-five years ago, the little village seemed like the end of the world. His first twenty some years there were spent without running water or electricity. Having come from Saint-Paul de Vence and a rather affluent lifestyle, he had deliberately chosen to break away from the contemporary art scene in order to dedicate himself entirely to artistic aspirations more keenly inspired by a traditional way of thinking.
Totally absorbed in his own various creative adventures, Michel never tried to make a place for himself in the art market. Much of what is on display here has so far been seen by the lucky few and we are
grateful to him to have finally accepted to open up his studio so that this treasure trove can be seen, shared and enjoyed by all.
Born in Paris in 1941, son of the late painter VU Can Dam, Michel VU hears the call of the arts at an early age and signs up for art studies at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Nice. He lives successively in Paris, Vence, Saint-Paul de Vence, Mallorca and in Essaouira before settling down in 1974 in Ghazoua, a small Berber community on the outskirts of Essaouira. Far away from the tendencies and moods of the contemporary art world and inspired by this highly enchanting and creatively stimulating environment, Michel launches into a series of personal artistic researches.
Exhibitions
1963 - Galerie des Beaux-Arts - Brussels, Belgium
1965 - Wally F. Findlay Gallery - Palm Beach, Florida, USA
1972 - Wereinigte Werkstätten - Munich, Germany
1974 - Roch Art Gallery - Amsterdam, The Netherlands
1980 - Foyer of the Theater Mohamed V - Rabat, Morocco
1982 - L’Orangerie - Los Angeles, California, USA
1983 - Ankrum Gallery - Los Angeles, California, USA
1983 - Galerie Privât - Palma de Mallorca, Spain
1985 - Galerie Cupillard - Grenoble, France
1985 - Galerie Cour Saint-Pierre - Geneva, Switzerland
1985 - Focus Gallery - Lausanne, Switzerland
1985 - Foire de Bâle (stand in Gallery Steiner) - Bale, Switzerland
1988 - Musée de l’Automobile - Mougins, France
1986-1989 Gallerie Accalmie - Paris, France
1987-1990 Fine Art Gallery - Bale, Switzerland
1988-1993 Galerie La Dame à la Licorne - Saint-Paul de Vence, France
1988-1993 Galerie Damgaard - Essaouira, Morocco
1993 - Bab Rouah - Rabat, Morocco
1993 - Anfa - Casablance, Morocco
2001 - Le Palm Beach - Cannes, France
2004 - Galerie Tadghat - Marrakech, Morocco
2004 - Musée de Marrakech, Fondation Omar Benjelloun -
Marrakech, Morocco
His Life
Michel Vu spent his adolescence and part of his young adult years on the Côte d’Azur (French Riviera) where he met and frequented a number of great contemporary artists who either lived there or were frequent visitors to the area, among them Picasso, Chagall, Prévert, Klein, Arman, César, Malaval, Calder, Hartung, to name but a few. It was a brilliant, happy and prosperous era.
While many young local artists would opt to explore new art forms as encouraged by the influential Ecole de Nice, Michel is more attracted, fascinated, by the artistic vitality past and present of his immediate surroundings as experienced in occasional encounters with accomplished artists in whom he senses a great emotional quality belonging to yesteryear. His work from that era is a reflection of this quest for emotional meaning. His pathway is original and solitary from the very
beginning.
In the mid 60s, Michel becomes increasingly aware that the mundane and superficial life he has come to live in Saint-Paul, for all its attractiveness and comfort, is not very conducive to the development of his conscience as an artist but leading him instead on the way to conformity and superficiality. At the urging of his sister and her husband, the italian painter Domenico Gnoli, he decides to join them in Mallorca where he settles and dedicates himself entirely to painting.
The sudden death in 1970 of his friend and brother-in-law Domenico Gnoli throws Michel into a deep mental stupor from which he would take years to recover. The void left by Domenico’s absence would find him wandering endlessly, unable to find any purpose or meaning in life.
The dark cloud finally begins to lift off during a visit to Marrakech in 1973. The explosion of life, colors, scents and sounds he experiences there awakens all his senses and signals a new beginning for Michel, a true renaissance. More fascinating mystical experiences and a nascent spiritual awakening await him in Essaouira where he settles permanently in 1974.
Scenes of everyday life in traditional Morocco are a true enchantment for him. Having followed naturally the path of the Orientalist painters, his approach to art nonetheless retains its originality.
Through his Asian heritage he is allowed a clear, filtered vision
focused on the very essence of his subject in contrast to the
Orientalists’ work which often consists of many different subjects and a multitude of details.
The result of intense research and reflection, Michel’s work is imbued with the joy and enchantment of an artist who sees with the eyes of his heart or, as Matisse would have it, with the eyes of a child. How often was his work turned down by art merchants under the pretext that it did not belong in their gallery. Michel would not let that deter him from his deep personal conviction that he must forge ahead with his great life adventure.
From time to time, having produced a few paintings, Michel would roll them up onto his backpack and head off to Saint-Paul where his dear mother would sell them in the family’s gallery on the ground floor of their home on Place de la Fontaine. Oh for the love of Mothers!
Happy and re-energized by his visit, Michel would then rush back to his beloved Ghazoua to pursue his artistic adventure, alone and anonymous, without any catalogue, commission or the prospect of an eventual exhibition in some prestigious gallery. An unknown artist living happily in a corner of paradise without a care in the world.
Now, in the autumn of his life, Michel realizes that in his own way he has in fact followed in his father’s footsteps and those of his paternal family. His father, painter VU Cao Dam who left his native land at age 24 never to return, sang relentlessly through his paintings the beauty of a bygone world, that of his childhood in Vietnam. Cao Dam’s work finds its roots in the purest traditions of the wisdom of Confucius in which he was brought up and of which he became a trustee by virtue of his family’s tradition. According to Yi King, “Man’s way is love and justice”. Cao Dam reveled in painting pure love, the love of a mother for her child or the first whispers of young lovers, love of a transcendental nature.
In his lengthy exploration of new and unknown worlds, Michel has pursued a century-old family tradition. Custodian of so many ancestral values, he needed to live in a traditional world and environment, in close contact with nature in order to be able to absorb , process and give an expression to these very values.
The invention of a first engine made possible by the discovery of coal and petrol has profoundly transformed the lives of human beings.
Gradually alienated from nature, they have become strangers in a world of concrete. Artists, ever witnesses and chroniclers of their time, have expressed in their work from the outset this mutation of our reality of which abstract (non-figurative) art is the best and foremost manifestation. Technologically induced changes brought about by an overflow of energy have an exhilarating effect similar to that of recreational drugs on human beings: once “hooked”, one is left with an insatiable craving for more. Hooked on technology as we all have become in spite of ourselves and hardened by this new habit, we have slowly lost access to the essential and subtle realities of life as we sit, idle, watching the destruction of our planet. The sight of all these new generations of human beings in constant and complete fusion with their electronic “toys” leaves one wondering whether they still belong to the genus homo sapiens or have indeed undergone a complete mutation.
When settling in Essaouira in the early 70s, Michel had already
realized that the age of innocence was over for him. He had had his fill of parading in flashy, luxurious cars, smoking himself into oblivion and living life as thought it was an endless party. For the next twenty years he would live without running water or electricity. He firmly believed that only through very humble living and a great deal of effort at comprehending life in all its subtleties could he hope to accede to those hidden treasures of life, those rare and sublime instants of conscious awakening which cannot be found in eagerness and excitement but rather in serenity and sobriety.
A search for happiness through simplicity and closeness to nature, such is his approach to life, a life in which tenderness and imagination have nourished Michel’s every new artistic endeavor.