ARCHITECTURAL STRIPES IN PROVENCE LIGHT
Field Notes from Arles and Marseille: Colour, Light and Vertical Stripes
These large-format works show Harry MC’s practice amplifying his stripe language into sharper, hard-edged forms shaped by the light and geometry of places like Arles and its Luma campus and Mucem in Marseille. Developed through long-running Provence fieldwork the artworks translate architecture, shadow and Provençal colour into precise vertical sequences, each stripe isolated so every plane reads with clarity. Stripes are separate and breathe, widths and heights shift, and the composition sits floating on a white ground, a way of letting light organise the painting as much as colour does.
Lignes d'Arles #3, oil and pigment on canvas, 72 x 100 inches
Lignes d'Arles #4, oil and pigment on canvas, 72 x 72 inches
Lignes d’Arles series - Large Format Clean-Edged Stripe Paintings
Lignes d’Arles is Harry MC’s newest body of large-format stripe paintings, built from the colours and vertical structures found across Luma Arles and the surrounding Provençal landscape. Each work takes a reduced palette - olive greens, ochre reds, Provençal blues, pale greys, a flash of pink - and sets them as evenly spaced colour lines on white ground. The stripes stay sharp and architectural, but the colour shifts carry the warmth of southern light.
The series represents a more architectural form of stripe painting within Harry MC’s practice. Rather than the softened, hand-drawn edges of other works, these pieces embrace clarity: wide bands of evenly proportioned colour, each lifted from the surrounding Provençal environment. The white ground behaves almost as a Mediterranean wall, a surface on which colour can breathe, expand and contract. While rooted in observation, the paintings avoid literal representation. They draw instead from architectural rhythm: the vertical pull of Gehry’s Luma tower in, the stacked apertures of Arles façades, the intervals between shutters, drainpipes and shadows. The resulting works sit comfortably within the tradition of hard-edged abstraction, while retaining the warmth and chromatic intensity characteristic of Harry’s wider stripe language.
Mediterranean light first entered Harry MC’s visual vocabulary in the late 1970s. His stripe practice has been refined over decades, but the Provence fieldwork itself spans over twenty-five years — a sustained cycle of return visits that has produced a large visual archive of colour sequences, architectural rhythms, and shifting atmospheric light. The fieldwork extends from the stone alleys of Arles and the metallic surfaces of LUMA, to the ochre quarries of Roussillon and the coastal brightness of the Camargue. Each location becomes a supplier of chromatic information: a shutter’s faded turquoise, the red-ochre façade of a 17th-century townhouse, a narrow band of dusty violet caught in the shadow of a Roman arch.
The Lignes d’Arles series represents the latest refinement of that archive — hard-edged architectural stripes where boundaries are held cleanly. Wide, evenly spaced verticals are set on a white ground that functions as both stabiliser and pause. The paintings feel simultaneously structural and luminous: architecture translated into colour, then released back into light.
Luma Arles: A Conversation Between Architecture and Abstraction
Gehry’s tower rising above the stone-clad base of Luma Arles, its angular steel and glass sections catching fragmented light above the Parc des Ateliers. In the foreground, a playful tubular sculpture interrupts the geometry, a soft curve set against hard-edged verticals.
The influence of Luma Arles extends beyond colour. Gehry’s tower offers a constantly shifting demonstration of how vertical planes can behave under changing light. Morning sun produces cool sheets of silver-blue; midday pushes the facets toward white heat; late afternoon drops deep bronze and violet down the tower’s sides. These variations echo the internal logic of stripe painting, a sequence of verticals undergoing continuous modulation.
The building’s internal exhibitions further contribute to this dialogue. Large-scale photography, installation art, experimental film, sculpture and architectural retrospectives occupy the galleries each summer, often spilling out into the Parc des Ateliers. The breadth of contemporary work shown at Luma reinforces the building’s role as a catalyst, a site where material, colour and structure continually recombine.
From the top floor, where panoramic windows look out across the tiled roofs and pale stone streets of Arles, the view forms a natural companion to the paintings. Below lies a geometric mosaic of warm surfaces; above, a sharp line of sky; between them, the city arranged in long, quiet verticals, a composition already leaning toward stripes.
The façade of Gehry’s tower in full view—11,000 stainless-steel panels folding light into vertical planes. A structure that behaves almost like a living surface, shifting with every change in sky.
The iconic Luma slide: a twisting stainless-steel tube dropping through the building like a single giant stroke of metal. In black and white, its welded seams and curves reveal a sculptural, stripe-like rhythm. And a monochrome view of Luma’s internal framework - box-like steel forms, crisp edges and sharp tonal contrasts. Even in black and white, the building reads as a composition of stacked verticals.
Frank Gehry’s tower was conceived as a kind of sculpted light-catcher - 11,000 folded steel panels and internal structural ribs designed to fracture the Provençal sun into planes, glints and vertical shadows. Even the interior elements echo that logic: the exposed steel armatures, the sharp angles of the walkways and the great twisting slide that drops through the building like a coiled piece of industrial calligraphy. Seen through Harry MC’s lens, these details behave almost like three-dimensional stripes - bands of metal, light and shadow that shift as you move. The architecture becomes a study in repeated verticals and sudden curves, a machine for breaking colour into rhythm. Even the slide, with its rattling welded seams, feels like a stripe drawn at speed: a single, plunging line of steel that reminds the body that architecture can still be playful, unpredictable and full of movement.
Luma’s architecture offers an unusually direct dialogue with Harry MC’s stripe practice. Every surface—steel ribs, glass edges, folded panels, even the curving descent of the slide—breaks light into clear vertical or diagonal sequences. Seen from ground level or from the tower’s upper floors, the site becomes a map of repeated lines and shifting temperatures of colour, a contemporary counterpoint to the warm stone of Arles below. It is this conversation between material, light and geometry that anchors the hard-edged Provence stripe paintings shown on the same page. Explore more stripe work in the World of Stripes project →
From the upper levels of Luma, Arles opens out below: the wide roofs of the former railway workshops, now major contemporary exhibition spaces, set against the geometry of the new cultural campus.Next in the series are field notes from Marseille — where the MUCEM’s lattice skin, sea-light and shadow grids push the palette cooler and the structure even more emphatic.
Field Notes from Marseille: MUCEM, Sea-Light, and the Reduced Stripe
Harry had been drawn to the MUCEM long before he finally walked its edges. Ever since it was built, the building has sat in his mind as a modern Mediterranean instrument — not just architecture, but a device for turning light into pattern. For years he flew into Marseille, collected the keys to Provence, and disappeared inland. The city could feel too sharp around the edges, the harbour too loud, the pace too unsettled for the kind of looking he needs. But in 2024 he stayed for a few days, slowed down, and let Marseille show its calmer side.
The MUCEM became the anchor. From a distance it reads as a dark volume at the water’s edge; up close it becomes a screen — a lacework skin that filters sun into shifting grids. The day moves across it in pulses: hard noon brightness, softer sea-light, then the long slide toward evening. Shadow behaves like a material. The building throws pattern onto itself and onto the visitor, and it is this behaviour — light broken into intervals — that connects so naturally to stripe painting.
What interested Harry was not “hard-edge” as a style, but the way the architecture insists on separation: plane from plane, light from shadow, solid from void. In the passages and bridges he began thinking about reduction — how much a painting can hold when its vocabulary is pared back and white space is allowed to carry weight. Not emptiness, but structure: a pause that makes the next decision more audible.
Back in Bath, that thinking fed a new group of paintings with a cooler palette — blues, greys and blacks — and a sharper sense of placement. The stripes behave less like pattern and more like elements: held apart, allowed to breathe, varied in width and height, and suspended within a clear white field that functions as architecture rather than background. The composition does not rush to the edges. It holds itself in reserve, letting intervals do as much work as colour.
Marseille also offered a second register — not engineered, but lived. At La Friche la Belle de Mai, the former Seita tobacco factory repurposed as a cultural centre, industrial scale meets bold colour against concrete: a reminder that surface, programming and atmosphere can be designed as one experience. In Le Panier, graffiti reads like a street-level archive of rhythm — repeats, interruptions, sudden harmonies — an informal score written across walls.
A further lesson came from Fondation Carmignac. It was less a casual excursion than a long-awaited visit Harry had planned for years, delayed only by the awkwardness of getting there. Set on an island with no cars, the place recalibrates attention. Visitors move through the galleries in bare feet, and the simple shift in pace and contact makes looking feel less like “viewing” and more like inhabiting: space, light and timing treated as part of the work rather than a container for it.
Taken together, the Marseille days formed a compact fieldwork loop: museum architecture, working-city texture, contemporary platforms, and the constant presence of Mediterranean light. Marseille didn’t replace Provence. It sharpened a question Provence had already raised: how little is needed for a painting to remain fully charged.
This Marseille fieldwork sits within Harry MC’s wider World of Stripes research — a continuing study of how structure, rhythm and colour behave across different places and kinds of light.
MEASURED INTERVALS
Measured Intervals is a recent body of work by Harry MC that continues the architectural stripe investigation in a more distilled register — less about accumulation, more about proportion, pause, and how a canvas holds light. The Marseille fieldwork sharpened that direction, with the MUCEM acting as a modern Mediterranean instrument: a lattice screen that turns sea-light into shifting grids and makes separation feel structural — plane from plane, light from shadow, solid from void.
The Marseille volume combines fieldwork photography with studio studies (and in some cases realised paintings) that test stripe width and height, interval, and colour adjacency. Narrow white separations function as measured pauses, sharpening edges and allowing each colour to establish its temperature cleanly. The colour field “floats” within a white ground, stopping short on all four sides, shifting the work from pattern toward objecthood, a calibrated architectural presence rather than a surface effect.
Measured Intervals: Marseille No. 1
Measured Intervals: Marseille No. 2