Off-season at Chateau La Coste, a few miles north of Aix-en-Provence, and the rows of vines are bare tendrils, entwined. Between them, a few solitary visitors in hats and scarves are on a walking tour of the 44 architectural curiosities hidden in the 600-acre grounds – from Frank Gehry’s pick-up-sticks-esque pavilion to Andy Goldsworthy’s underground woven-tree cave, past Bob Dylan’s ironwork freight car, and down to Sean Scully’s giant geometric Corten steel framework. Dotted around are a number of cranes, construction machinery and workmen.

A golf buggy pulls up to the whitewashed curvilinear Oscar Niemeyer pavilion, and in swaggers the artist Damien Hirst. Beside him is La Coste’s owner and visionary, Belfast-born property investor and hotelier Paddy McKillen, a quietly formidable presence. He’s less comfortable with the circus of people who are here to photograph the two men in advance of Hirst’s new show, The Light That Shines, set to open here on 2 March. It will be the British provocateur’s first show at the vineyard, and also the first time a single artist will take over all five of the exhibition spaces. Classics such as Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde will gather in Renzo Piano’s glass-box pavilion, while new works include The Secret Garden paintings shown by Gagosian at Frieze London last October, and a flutter of red Empress paintings in the orange cantilevered Richard Rogers Gallery.

The two men face each other amid pieces from Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, the elaborate multimillion-pound fiction first shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale as a provocative comment on myth, truth, storytelling and curatorship. McKillen’s unease is swept away by Hirst’s bouncy improv style – one minute he sticks his head between the legs of a sculpture, the next he’s biting the wings of the Golden Pegasus, then holding McKillen’s hand in a reflection of the nearby sculpture of Mickey Mouse: “Collector and friend.” Eventually, McKillen’s smile is genuine.