If you are headed to France this summer, take the opportunity to visit the Loire Valley for a slice of Bermuda art. In what is being billed as the Olympics for creatives, artists from the 203 countries competing in the Summer Games were invited to submit pieces for Apollo’s Decathlon: A Conceptual Cultural Olympiad, an exhibit that opened in June at Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art.

James Cooper’s Venus, Some Time Later, is on display alongside photographs by Aderonke Bademosi Wilson and Meredith Andrews.

Mr Cooper learnt of the exhibit through Lisa Howie, whose Black Pony Gallery and Atlantic World Art Fair have a goal of helping raise the profile of artists in the wider Caribbean region.

“If she hadn’t contacted me, I wouldn’t have had that kind of opportunity,” he said. “I still had to send my work in and have it vetted but the opportunity definitely came through her.”

Organisers accepted conceptual works in black and white in one of ten categories: painting, drawing, poetry, music, digital art/new media, sculpture, performance, fiction, installation and photography.

“You have to be a little bit thick skinned as an artist,” Mr Cooper said. “You're not guaranteed to get in; you get rejected from things and you move on. But in this case, they took the work.”

His photograph shows a woman gracefully sinking through water, half unclothed. As the title suggests it was an imagined portrait of what might have happened had Botticellis' Venus slipped.

The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli, an Italian artist of the 15th century, shows the Roman goddess of love standing fully grown on a scallop shell, shortly after her birth.

“At some point in my life, I was reading a criticism about it where the person was saying it wasn’t physically accurate; that Venus was standing too far forward on the shell and she would have slipped off,” said Mr Cooper.

From his perspective it was “a crazy way to look at a painting” but it got him thinking.

“Basically, it's an underwater picture of what Venus would have looked like had she fallen off the scallop shell.

“I like very simple things. So from a conceptual basis, it would start from something like that but then for me, I want the picture to be interesting even if you have that backstory to it.”

The real challenge for Mr Cooper was choosing an appropriate piece for the show. He was grateful that Venus, Some Time Later, which he’d shot in 2022, fit the bill.

“They had their own parameters. I’m guessing they were trying to fit ‘X’ amount of pictures into the space so all the pictures had to be the same size and they had to be black and white because, I guess, that's their aesthetic, their idea for their show,” he said.

“I had to find a work of art that I'd done that could live at that size and look good in black and white. In a lot of my work, colour plays a really important part.

“A lot of my work wouldn't fit in well with that show because when I turn it to black and white it doesn’t look good. So those kinds of parameters shaped what picture I chose to send there.”

The exhibit was a collaboration between the Château de Montsoreau Museum’s president and founder, Philipe Meaille, a French author and art collector, and its vice-president Marie Caroline Chaudruc.

The winners will be selected by Éric de Chassey, a French curator and Sandra Hegedus, a prominent collector.

“From the way I understand it, it’s a cultural sideshow to the Olympics. They had this idea to invite artists from all the countries that would be represented in the Olympics,” Mr Cooper said.

“Whether they’ve done that or not, I don't know. As I understand it, [it wasn’t that they would accept artists] from every country, they had to like the work as well. It's great to have been accepted.

“It’s fun to be involved with that kind of stuff. It's always flattering to have your work looked at by people who don't know you at all, who are involved in the greater art world, and have them say, ‘I like it’.”

• Apollo’s Decathlon: A Conceptual Cultural Olympiad runs until August 11 at Château de Montsoreau Museum of Contemporary Art. For more information, visithttps://www.chateau-montsoreau.com/wordpress/en/. See James Cooper’s work on Instagram: @jamesjamescooper