Le Sirenuse’s Iconic Swimming Pool Gets a Summer Makeover by Nicolas Party

The project began, as the artist recalls, through the “human connection and friendship” with Le Sirenuse’s co-owners Antonio and Carla Sersale, Rittson-Thomas, designer Marie Lusa and her gallerist partner Gregor Staiger. “It was a very family-based, collegial approach, which I found great”, says Party, who spent time at the property.  This commission was rather different, and more challenging, than those of past years. “When an artist first visits the hotel, they’re pretty much given carte blanche, within reason, on what the work will be and where it will be placed,” says Rittson-Thomas, “but in this case, we knew it had to be the pool, and we knew also that the material should be mosaic.”

Party, who has painted mountainscapes in the past with overlapping forms, wanted to convey the idea of  land, water and sky melding for the viewer. “It’s very inspired by ancient Chinese landscape painting”, the artist says. “It is  very metaphorical and symbolic. Are they mountains? Are they clouds? Or are they like waves or smoke? Are those pink patches glimpses of a forest fire?”. Everything, he points out “is interconnected, we’re just living in the middle of it: the clouds make the water that create the waves through rain, and then the colour of the water is the colour of the sky reJlected”. Even the perspective is quite literally all at sea: “I removed the horizon because it didn’t work with the pool, in my opinion. So the cloud comes from all sorts of directions”.

Antonio Sersale never had any doubts and knew that the work would be a masterpiece, remembering the first time he encountered Party’s art. “It  totally captivated me”, he recalls. “I loved the way he was able to create a whole world, I loved the way he combined playfulness with attention to detail. It struck me then that it would be wonderful to ask him to reimagine the swimming pool of Le Sirenuse. 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”.

The pool is an integral part of the hotel and it was important that the new artwork reflected its historic legacy, paying homage to Antonio’s late father Franco Sersale, a collector and aesthete whose vision is the result of the famed hotel today. “When we asked Nicolas to create a mosaic for a pool that was  starting to show its age”, comments Antonio, “we were really just carrying forward a tradition inaugurated by my father almost forty years ago.”

A version of this article first appeared in print in our 2024 Summer Issue under the headline “The Artful Life.” Subscribe to the magazine.