There is a particular quality of light on the boulevard de la Croisette in July — white and slightly merciless, the kind that flattens shadows and turns the sea into hammered silver. It is, paradoxically, the perfect backdrop for an exhibition that trades in colour so saturated it seems to generate its own glow. La Malmaison, the neoclassical belle époque pavilion that stands at number 47 like a composed elder amid the festival crowds, has a gift for this sort of productive contrast.
From 17 July 2026, the Centre d'art contemporain La Malmaison in Cannes hosts Mirages du monde, a survey exhibition of paintings by Hervé Di Rosa — one of the most restlessly curious figures in contemporary French art. The show draws on a practice that spans painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics and tapestry, presenting a body of work that is colourful, free and, in the artist's own cheerful tradition, quietly subversive.
A Career Built on Wandering
Di Rosa is, above all, a traveller in the deepest sense: not a tourist collecting impressions, but an artist who has spent decades embedding himself in the craft traditions of countries across Africa, Asia, Latin America and beyond, absorbing local techniques and visual languages before folding them back into his own. He was a founding figure of the Figuration Libre movement that emerged in France in the early 1980s — a loose, irreverent current that pushed back against the austerity of conceptual art with cartoonish energy, raw line and unabashed pleasure in making things. The movement shared a generational spirit with American Neo-Expressionism and the Italian Transavanguardia, though Di Rosa's version always felt more genuinely nomadic, less interested in theory than in the physical contact between a hand and an unfamiliar material.
Over the years, that contact has taken him to workshops in Sénégal, Mexico, China, India and elsewhere — each stay producing not souvenirs but collaborations, editions and new bodies of work in which his signature cast of rounded, wide-eyed figures migrates through entirely different pictorial systems. The result is an oeuvre that is impossible to pin to a single medium or register, which is precisely what makes a survey exhibition worthwhile.
'À travers la peinture, la sculpture, le dessin, la céramique ou encore la tapisserie, Hervé Di Rosa propose un univers coloré, libre et joyeusement subversif.'
La Malmaison as Frame
The venue matters here. La Malmaison was originally built as an annex to the grand Hôtel Gonnet et de la Reine in the nineteenth century; today, stripped of its hotel function, it operates as one of the Riviera's more intimate contemporary art spaces — two floors, high ceilings, windows that let in the Croisette light without quite surrendering to it. The building has hosted significant solo presentations before, and its scale suits work that rewards close looking rather than panoramic spectacle. Di Rosa's paintings — dense with incident, populated by his recurring characters, built up in layers that repay attention — are well-matched to rooms where you can stand close without being jostled.
Visitors arriving from the beach will find the transition instructive: from the studied minimalism of Cannes in high summer — white linen, discreet logos, the geometry of sunbeds — into rooms that hum with a different kind of visual intelligence. Di Rosa's world is not chaotic, but it is emphatically populated. Things happen at the edges of his canvases. Figures accumulate. Ceramics sit alongside weavings with the easy confidence of objects that have already travelled far.
The exhibition runs from mid-July, placing it squarely within the season when the Croisette is at its most performative. There is something apt about that timing: Mirages du monde — 'mirages of the world' — is a title that acknowledges the gap between the image of a place and its reality, between the surface and what lies beneath. On a boulevard where appearances are professionally maintained, that feels less like a provocation than a quiet, well-timed observation.
La Malmaison is at 47 boulevard de la Croisette, Cannes. Full details and visiting information at cannes.com.