There is a particular quality of light on the Croisette on a June morning, before the heat settles and the beach crowds thicken. The plane trees hold their shadows close to the pavement, and the sea beyond the Palais sits very still. At number 47, set back just enough from the boulevard's theatre of self-presentation, La Malmaison waits with its shuttered Belle Époque facade — a building that has, over the decades, learned to keep its own counsel.
On Saturday 20 June 2026 at 11 a.m., the centre d'art contemporain opens that counsel a little wider. The curator of the current exhibition Jam Session — dedicated to the work of painter Carole Benzaken — will lead a one-hour guided visit through the show, speaking to the decisions that shaped it: which works were selected and why, how they were hung, what the scenographic choices were intended to say, and where the unspoken conversations between individual pieces take place. Payment is made on arrival at the centre's reception desk.
The Exhibition and the Artist
Carole Benzaken is a French painter whose practice moves between figuration and abstraction, between the intimate and the monumental. Her canvases have long engaged with questions of memory, image, and the layering of visual experience — concerns that resonate with particular force in a city whose identity is so thoroughly constructed through the image. The title Jam Session carries its own suggestion: improvisation, call and response, the productive tension between structure and freedom.
What a curator-led visit offers is something distinct from the experience of walking a show alone. The selection of works for an exhibition is, in itself, an act of interpretation — a argument made in paint and space. The hanging order, the distances between pieces, the height at which a canvas meets the eye: these are not incidental decisions. Hearing the person who made them articulate their reasoning is, in effect, a second exhibition running parallel to the first.
'La sélection des œuvres, l'accrochage, les choix scénographiques et les dialogues entre les pièces' — the visit covers the full architecture of how an exhibition comes to be.
The Venue, and Why It Matters
La Malmaison has an unusual position in the landscape of French contemporary art. Occupying a former grand hotel annex built at the turn of the twentieth century, it sits on one of the most commercially saturated stretches of Mediterranean coastline in the world — and quietly refuses the logic of spectacle that surrounds it. Its programme has consistently favoured depth over event, and the building's modest scale enforces a kind of intimacy that larger institutions cannot manufacture.
For visitors to Cannes accustomed to arriving for the Film Festival or the advertising industry's annual gatherings, the centre offers a different register entirely. The Croisette address is the same; the noise level is not.
Admission is priced at €6.50 full rate, with a reduced rate of €2.50 available for visitors aged 18 to 25, groups of ten or more adults, and holders of the Cannes Pass Culture. Free admission applies — with documentation — to under-18s, students, job-seekers, people with disabilities and their companions, leisure centre groups, ICOM card holders, and teachers bringing a class. The curator-led visit itself carries an additional charge of €2, paid on site.
The visit runs for one hour. On a June morning in Cannes, with the light still forgiving and the day not yet fully committed to summer excess, that hour in front of Benzaken's work — mediated by the person who chose each piece and decided where it would stand — feels like a reasonable use of time. The sea will still be there afterwards.