Le Sirenuse’s Swimming Pool Gets A Summer Makeover

The famed Le Sirenuse hotel[1] 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[2]. 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.”