L’homme de Pierre (Stone Man) statue in the courtyard of the Chapelle-Saint-Elme in Villefranche-sur-mer. Created by artist Max Cartier, it is one of a number of stone men statues created in the late 1980s. Visitors who fly into Nice will have seen a similar statue, Le Voyageur (The Traveler), in the roundabout between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 at Nice Cote d’Azur International Airport.

Cartier found the large stones to be an especially appealing artistic medium because they are, “Massive, obvious, mineral as far as the iron tendons that articulate them. They do not explain themselves. They do not relate to any discourse on art, no tribe of criticism.”