In addition to producing wine, Domaine de Rocheville has been organizing art exhibitions since 2015. As part of the partnership established in 2022 with the house-gallery Le Cactus Bleu located in the Loire Valley, it lends its walls in September and October to a French artist : Cécile Filipe.

Who is Cécile Filipe ?

Cécile Filipe is a painter living in Varennes sur Loire, a few kilometers from Saumur.

Born in Lisbon, she left Portugal at the age of 10 and went to live in Paris with her parents. This uprooting leaves her with a deep feeling of nostalgia, a never-ending saudade, at the origin of her artistic vocation: drawing becomes a way to connect to her roots and to bring back her memories of Portugal: the cobblestone streets, the 25-April bridge, the laundry drying in the windows, the yellow tramway…

After training as an interior designer at the Camondo School, she worked for 20 years as the head of a Parisian design office while continuing to develop her artistic practice. Today, Cécile has left Paris and settled on the banks of the Loire, the river that reminds her of her native Tagus, and she now devotes herself entirely to her art.

She exhibits regularly, individually or collectively, in France and abroad (Paris, London, New York, Touraine…). She is a member of “The Screaming Art International Group”, which gathers about sixty artists through 27 countries, and her paintings are sold all over the world.

Abstract paintings full of emotions and poetry

Very observant, Cécile Filipe listens to her sensations. A simple walk in nature is an inexhaustible source of emotions: the vibration of the wind, the movement of a blade of grass, the shadows and the lights, in particular the changing reflections on the royal river, are as many inspirations which will be transformed into artistic impulse and will take shape under her brush.

Her painting is intuitive, abstract, but even if she assures that any resemblance with a known landscape would be purely coincidental, certain memories seem to have been invited into her paintings. One can easily imagine here a bridge, there a beach or a hill, there again the lights on the Tagus.

The artistic evolution and technique of Cécile Filipe

The artist has always practiced a mixed technique combining acrylic paint on canvas, pure pigments and collage but she also uses ink and watercolor on paper.

At the beginning, she drew a lot of beams and lines, adding in the background texts and poems in Portuguese, her mother tongue.

She works in layers, one on top of the other, like waves. A layer of paint is sanded, rubbed, then covered and so on, which gives her paintings a particular relief.

From her past as an architect, Cécile Filipe has kept the taste for balance and the desire to go to the essential. She likes to paint with bright primary colors but her palette is reduced because she hates overload. Some of her compositions are in contrasting shades of blue and black, others in red, black and white, and still others mainly in yellow and gray.

The objective is to give the eye that rests on the canvas a feeling of calm and appeasement.

As her works are mostly large, the artist has equipped her studio with a large mirror in which she can observe them from a distance, like a spectator whose fresh eye can spot defects that would not be visible up close.

Abstract art and wine at Domaine de Rocheville

From September 13 to October 12, 2022, the large tasting room of the Domaine de Rocheville, with its bay windows overlooking the vineyards and the valley of Parnay, will host some thirty paintings by the artist.

“Black and White Soul”, “On the Water”, “Punto Final”, “Ultimo Porto”, each abstract canvas has a title in English or Portuguese. Each is illustrated by a label bearing a quote from The Book of Intranquility, by Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa. Surprisingly, this superb work, written at the beginning of the 20th century, exudes an intense poetry that resonates in unison with the contemporary paintings.

Cécile Filipe’s exhibition at the Domaine de Rocheville

With a glass of Crémant de Loire in hand, let yourself be carried away by the contemporary works of Cécile Filipe for a multi-sensory experience in our atypical art gallery.

The exhibition is freely visible during the opening hours of the winery, from Monday to Saturday, from 10am to 6pm.
If you fall in love with it, you can even buy one of the paintings on display. They are on sale via the Cactus Bleu.

If you are an art lover or a lover of fine wines, we hope to see many of you at our winery to discover this superb exhibition!

Where to see the exhibition ? Domaine de Rocheville, Chemin de Béniquet, Les Hauts de Valbrun, 49730 Parnay.

Co-organizer : Le Cactus Bleu, 6 rue Nationale, 37380 Reugny.