The famed Le Sirenuse hotel in the Italian city of Positano has unveiled a makeover of the hotel pool by Swiss artist Nicolas Party. Party’s work is the latest addition to the hotel’s ongoing series of site-specific series of commissions curated by Silka Rittson-Thomas, which to date comprises works by Martin Creed, Stanley Whitney, Rita Ackermann and Alex Israel. Each artist is invited to Positano to develop the work and to find a home for it at the family-run property owned by Antonio and Carla Sersale. Party has created an exuberant play of overlapping and interlocking organic forms, transforming the view from the poolside terrace of mountains, sun, sea and sky into a joyous, billowing landscape that shifts and dances underwater. The collaboration saw the artist spending a week at the hotel to get inspired for this mosaic installation. “It was a very family-based, collegial approach, which I found great,” he explains. Party opted for an abstract pattern, explaining that “in a hotel that is already pretty perfect, I didn’t want the pool to stand out too much…I wanted it to look like a pool.” For the same reason, he chose a blue-green color palette for the overlapping wave-like shapes that swirl across the pool’s floor and climb its walls. In the center of the pool’s deepest section, he placed a disc made of golden mosaic tiles that, he says, “people will think of as the sun, because it’s gold and a circle…so when you jump into the pool, you’re jumping into the sky.” The New York-based artist worked closely with Italian surfaces company Bisazza to translate his original pastel drawing into a pattern of glass mosaic tiles. “It struck me that it would be wonderful to ask him to reimagine the swimming pool of Le Sirenuse,” says Antonio Sersale. “When you enter a pool, you are entering another world, a watery realm that becomes even more rich and strange here on the hotel’s terrace, suspended magically between sea and sky.”
