Port-Cros is beautiful enough to make almost anyone want to describe it. L’Entretien de Port-Cros chooses instead to meet a man there.
Jean-Claude Silbermann has lived on this Var island for several decades, pursuing his work as a painter, poet and maker of objects within a lifelong relationship with Surrealism. On 23 September 2025, François Carrassan travelled there to interview him. Photographer Bernard Plossu accompanied the meeting. Every photograph reproduced in the resulting book was taken that same day. The material has now been published by Les Cahiers de l’Égaré in a 104-page volume.
On Saturday 5 September 2026, from 10.30am to noon, Charlemagne Hyères will bring Silbermann, Plossu and Carrassan together for a signing devoted to the book.
It is a local event, but the history behind it reaches considerably further.
A Surrealist on an island
Jean-Claude Silbermann belongs to an increasingly rare generation: one that encountered Surrealism not as a chapter in an art history textbook but as a living movement.
Born in 1935, he joined the circle around André Breton while still a young man. Poetry, painting, objects and a refusal to keep artistic disciplines neatly separated would remain central to his work. His art was shown in Hyères in 2023 in the exhibition “Hold-Up” at La Banque, musée des Cultures et du Paysage, followed by exhibitions in Paris in 2024 and New York in 2025.
L’Entretien de Port-Cros follows that sequence of exhibitions while taking a very different approach.
Instead of moving Silbermann’s work into another museum, Carrassan and Plossu travel towards the artist and the place where he lives.
That distinction matters.
Port-Cros becomes more than a landscape capable of inspiring an artist. It becomes the place from which the artist himself looks at the world.
The title is therefore deliberately modest. This is neither a definitive biography nor a catalogue raisonné. Something of the conversation, the journey and the encounter has been preserved.
Carrassan raises the question at the heart of the project himself: what does it mean to be a Surrealist on Port-Cros? Does the island alter Surrealism, or does a Surrealist way of seeing alter the island?
That might sound like an abstract question until a photographer enters the conversation.
Bernard Plossu’s second gaze
Bernard Plossu also has an established relationship with the Hyères landscape. His name was previously attached to a book about the gardens and islands of Hyères with François Carrassan and Gilles Tiberghien. In L’Entretien de Port-Cros, his photographs do more than decorate the recorded conversation. They provide a second way of looking at the same day.
The decision to take every photograph on 23 September 2025 gives the book a particular unity.
Words and images come from the same moment.
This makes the volume different from an interview later supplemented with archive photographs selected to illustrate an artist’s career. Instead, readers encounter parallel traces of one day: what was said, what was seen and what the camera retained.
It is an approach particularly suited to an artist for whom unexpected associations, shifts in meaning and freedom of perception have always mattered.
For the Surrealists, an encounter was never necessarily just an appointment.
Beyond the Port-Cros postcard
The book also provides another way of looking at Port-Cros itself.
The island is generally associated with its national park, walking trails, Mediterranean landscapes and environmental protection. All of that is real, yet it can gradually produce a postcard image of its own.
L’Entretien de Port-Cros adds another layer: an island as a place of artistic life.
Silbermann does not appear to have settled there simply to turn its landscape into picturesque subject matter. Les Cahiers de l’Égaré instead emphasises his attachment to Port-Cros and the way his recent cut-out pieces disturb, at least symbolically, the apparent calm surrounding the island.
This is where the book becomes most interesting.
It does not merely ask what an artist does on an island. It asks what it means to continue practising Surrealism when, for much of the public, the movement has become a historical period associated with Breton, Aragon, Éluard, Ernst or Dalí.
For Silbermann, the word does not seem to describe a finished period.
It still describes a way of being.
A Var publisher and a different kind of literary life
The publication also has a local dimension extending beyond Port-Cros itself.
L’Entretien de Port-Cros is published by Les Cahiers de l’Égaré, a Var-based independent press whose catalogue moves between theatre, literature, poetry, essays and works that do not fit easily into the most commercial publishing categories. The book, ISBN 978-2-35502-174-9, was published in July 2026.
At a time when literary attention naturally turns towards the hundreds of novels launched by major national publishers for the rentrée, books such as this are a reminder that literary life also takes place elsewhere.
It happens in smaller publishing houses, in works that combine photography, conversation, poetry and art history, and in projects deeply rooted in a landscape without becoming merely regional.
Here, the Var is neither a tourist selling point nor scenery artificially attached to a book. Port-Cros is where the meeting happened, Hyères is where that meeting will continue in public, and a local publisher has turned the conversation into an object readers can keep.
From Breton to Port-Cros
Almost sixty years after André Breton’s death, Surrealism now belongs firmly to the history of art and literature.
That makes Jean-Claude Silbermann’s presence particularly unusual. He remains a living connection with an intellectual and artistic adventure most later generations have encountered only through books, museums and reproductions.
L’Entretien de Port-Cros avoids turning him into a monument.
Instead, it returns to something much simpler: three men, an island, a conversation and a camera.
In an age of major retrospectives and commemorations, that modest scale may not be the least appropriate way of approaching an artist whose work has consistently resisted rigid frames.
Jean-Claude Silbermann, François Carrassan and Bernard Plossu will meet at Charlemagne Hyères on Saturday 5 September, from 10.30am to noon, for a signing of L’Entretien de Port-Cros.
More importantly, it offers readers an opportunity to encounter a still-living fragment of a Surrealist history that can sometimes appear permanently consigned to libraries and museums.
