While Arles might have changed, its historical heritage hasn’t and, for Jorge Pardo, the artist behind the L’Arlatan project, Van Gogh is still the most important asset, from an artistic point of view, that the city possesses. “And how does a person like me engage in dialogue with that?” he asks himself. The answer can be seen in the project he developed for the hotel unit owned by Maja Hoffmann, art collector and owner of L’Arlatan.

Jorge Pardo has transformed the hotel into something of a voyage and the floors into a kaleidoscopic landscape. And this was the starting point for everything else. 6000 square metres comprising almost two million handmade mosaic fragments – including 18 colours and 11 shapes – organise the space and bring together the various historic buildings (the central one being classified as a Historic Monument) positioned around a magnificent courtyard. This was the gesture that Pardo conceived, along with the design of the 400 sculptural lamps, the nearly 1300 pieces of furniture designed and handmade in his studio and the original paintings rendered on the doors, many of them inspired by the Japanese prints that so fascinated Van Gogh.