Mondrian painted flowers. We know of around 150 paintings and drawings by him, almost invariably depicting a single flower standing out against a neutral background, painted with expression and vigor. Mondrian's flower paintings stand in stark contrast to the development of his neoplastic system, which he pursued in parallel; and if they remain little-known, it's both because of the contempt in which the painter's commentators held these figurative works, and because of the artist's own reticence. Flowers were a livelihood, a minor practice. Mondrian “made flowers” to earn a living, at a time when his abstract canvases were met with incomprehension. And yet, Mondrian loved to paint flowers, and despite his efforts to backdate some of them to make them look like youthful works, this production accompanied him throughout his career.

The critic Michel Seuphor, the artist's leading biographer, reported Mondrian as saying to him one day in 1925 or 1926: “Now, too bad, I'll starve, but I won't make any more flowers”. This rejection was part of a broader disgust with nature, which became increasingly pronounced as the painter moved towards abstraction. Seuphor recounts how, one day, at Albert Gleizes's house, he asked to change his seat at the table so as not to eat facing the trees of the Bois de Boulogne. How can we explain such an aversion in an artist whose work turned Western painting on its head with an extraordinary series of tree paintings? Probably because the artist knew that his love of the forms of nature clashed with the extremely demanding, almost fanatical, goal he had set for himself. And that by taking this difficult path alone, he was in a way renouncing an almost guilty fascination.

This exhibition is conceived as a tribute to Mondrian's flowers. It brings together the “flowers” of ten contemporary artists who could be described as conceptual, because their work is part of an intellectual approach to questioning the image. In their various forms, the works brought together for this exhibition borrow from the history of floral representation in painting and the decorative arts: handmade wallpapers by Morris & Sanderson (Kate Owens), Ikebana (Christophe Lemaitre & Aurélien Mole), decorative bronzes (Rémy Brière), photographs of plants (Jean-Luc Moulène, Batia Suter, Inga Kerber), watercolors (Ann Craven), collage (Daniel Gordon), dried flowers (Morgan Courtois). The motif of the flower is a pretext for exploring the limits of the genre, a quest that involves, for example, the tireless repetition of the same subject in Ann Craven's work, or, on the contrary, the suppression of the motif in Kate Owens's; the deconstruction of still-life conventions in Jean-Luc Moulène's work; or the artificial reconstruction of a simulacrum of a flower from digital images in Daniel Gordon's work. The whole emancipates itself from simple figurative representation to suggest that perhaps the floral genre survives only through its own exhaustion; and that it is above all as a non-subject that the flower still appears in contemporary art.

But that would probably be too simple. For the whole bears witness to an ambiguity not unlike that of Mondrian. Through their interplay of attraction and distance, these works raise the ever-present question of artists' relationship with the forms of nature, decoration and convention. They demonstrate that the familiar and re-familiar lines of the orchid or field flower are still a pretext for invention and experimentation. For rather than a non-subject, isn't the flower the subject of art par excellence?


Camille Azaïs