The interest of the small 16^th century church of Sainte-Apollonie, with its single nave, lies in a group of paintings executed by François Bernadi (1922-2022), a fisherman from Collioure, whose qualities as a graphic artist and writer were recognized by Raoul Dufy and Albert Camus.
Out of friendship for the parish priest Ibos, who he met in 1950, he covered the walls of the choir in just six months "for the price of a raincoat", with a profusion of tempera paintings on plaster relating the legend of the saint venerated by the parish priest in two triptychs opposite one another : her arrest and her martyrdom. The departure of the parish priest Ibos interrupted the decoration of the nave, which Bernadi, taking advantage of the renovation of the church, only completed in 1996, and he finally painted the Wedding at Cana on the walls of the porch, another subject dear to parish priest Ibos.
The spontaneity of the painter, who admits himself that his art has : "...no style, no theory, it comes from the heart, from the hands", is expressed by the absence of a real program as much as by the pictorial gesture, the vigor of the compositions and the use of other techniques such as sculpture, modelling, engraving or rather stamping of the support. The colorful palette, close to a luminous Mediterranean Fauvism, shows a certain kinship with the work of Derain, who Bernadi admired.
Bernadi’s empathy for his contemporaries is perceptible: the saint has the features of his future wife, just as other characters have the faces of actual Aurinois. Just as a multitude of fish are caught in a net, an obvious Christian symbol, a dead bull no doubt evokes the Spanish refugees, some of whom were his friends. This obvious benevolence is thus sometimes tinged with harshness.