With Et Bardot créa Saint-Tropez, Gregory BAÔO revisits the imagery associated with Brigitte Bardot’s aura on the Riviera. Through selective colorization and manual intervention, the archival image does not seek to restore the past. Instead, it reactivates memory, where figure, place, and light become a symbolic territory.

 

Pink crystals highlight the center of each flower in the dress pattern, while the leaves are deliberately left in their original green tone. This subtle contrast intensifies the radiance of the pink and creates a luminous vibration at the heart of the flowers, like a sensitive presence embedded within the material of the image.

 

The wide straw hat, placed like a halo of Mediterranean light, goes beyond the elegance of an accessory. It becomes a distinctly French and Tropezian sign, a symbol of gentle freedom, where shade and sunlight merge. Its silhouette seems to carry within it the birth of a place and of a myth.

 

A quotation by Bardot, discreetly concealed within the artwork:

 

“Je suis l’homme de ma vie.”

 

Resonates with this inner posture, suggesting an affirmed independence, where the icon also reveals herself as personal identity and intimate freedom.

 

Between historical reinterpretation and contemporary presence, the artwork explores how an attitude can shape a place and how, in return, a place can give form to a legend.