A Painter’s Studio in France Needed Maintenance. The Contractor Found Ancient Art Behind its Walls.

After 35 years of use, Jean Charles Blais’ art studio in Vence, France, sprung a leak. As the painter tells it, a contractor removed a bit of the wall’s plaster coating in search of water, only to find a ghost of ancient Rome.

Cradling the studio’s walls was a stone artwork from the first or second century CE, when the Romans called this land Vintium. Vintium was a provincial but notable city in Roman Gaul; its legacy endures largely in the architecture of its old town—if you know what to look for—and a modest collection of artifacts, which has just increased in number by one (large bound).

During the summer maintenance, Blais and the contractor first spotted a Latin inscription. Chipping away the rest of the pale plaster revealed a hidden design, a series of faded, looping florets.

“I would see this as the central part of a funerary inscription, probably carved on three of these stones one above the other,” Professor Roger Tomlin of Oxford University said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

Tomlin was the first expert contacted by Blais’ representation, Opera Gallery (locations in New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere worldwide). The first stone, Tomlin said, would have borne the name of the deceased, followed by the name of the inscription’s dedicatee (or executor). What’s visible is the description of the dead, identified as “CONIVGI,” a gender-neutral term in Latin which can mean “wife” or “husband”.

Stéphane Morabito, who holds a doctorate in ancient epigraphy from the Alpes-Maritimes—this corner of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region—placed its construction between 100 and 300 CE and added that the epitaph also mentioned a “Valeria Apronia”, though it’s unclear how this person was related to the deceased.

“The name Valeria is very widespread in the Western Roman world and is particularly found in the ancient province of the Maritime Alps,” in which modern-day Vence was founded, Morabito said in her analysis of the stone, which was shared with ARTnews. “Around ten inscriptions or fragments of inscriptions have been found in this sector of Vence over the centuries,” and most mentioned the gens, or family name, of the Valerii—translated in the present-day as Valerius or Valeria. Apronia, Morabito said, was likely a nickname.

While there is currently no plan to remove the stone, archaeologists will survey the surrounding area to see if further traces of antiquity can be found.  

For his part, Blais was already having a busy year, which included the group exhibition “Transatlantic: Figurations of the 80s,” at Opera Gallery Paris. Could he keep working amid an excavation? Could he keep working here, in his home, at all? He acquired the building 35 years ago as a disused agricultural facility. Though centuries ago, he said, it was a chapel, and that’s how he thinks of it. The property consists of a large courtyard where he often works, as well as one large room and two small annexes once used by the clergy to store vestments and prepare for service.

“I started living with my Roman stone in the studio from that first day, a little over two years ago,” he told ARTnews via email. “Initially, I had not developed any real scientific or archaeological curiosity. These were clearly ancient words, something perhaps from ancient or early Middle Ages I assumed.” The name “VALERIAE”, he learned to his delight after a Google search, was the name of a flower.

“It looked to me like a fragment of a poem,” he said.

Blais, born in 1956, in Nantes, is a veteran of the French art world, having first earned acclaim in 1981 after participating in Bernard Lamarche-Vadel’s show of new French figuration. That decade he established his vision of humanity as abstracted, even agitated bodies emerging from coarsely converged surfaces. Salvaged newspaper and poster are often incorporated into or sometimes subsume his canvases, complimenting the idea that people offer themselves in glimpses, rather than entireties.

“My working process therefore consists of painting and removing layers of paper to reveal and transform by drawing those which are buried and covered, you imagine how this ancient appearance evokes a similarity of gestures, a coincidence that is both astonishing and familiar,” he said.

In an ancient site like Vence, you live among antiquity, which suits the artist well. (“I am not so much interested in the condition of the appearance of “newness” but very much in the permanence and insistence of ancient forms,” he said.)

His previous series was influenced by the Idylls of Theocritus, a collection of early bucolic poems, which ruminate on the beauty and wisdom of pastoral life. The Etruscan tombs scattered across the French Mediterranean, some painted or carved with funeral scenes, also recently figured into the series, which was exhibited in the Lambert Collection in Avignon. Actually, the Roman stone was only discovered because the storage room that held these paintings was emptied out in preparation for the show.

Blais might call it fate. “I think it could certainly be a sign to designate a thematic direction towards my future work: after Theocritus: Rome!”