Flowers Series
The floral still life is one of the oldest and most revered genres in painting. From the delicate compositions of Flemish masters to the vibrant color explosions of Impressionism, flowers have served as symbols of ephemeral beauty, life, death, and fertility.
Moving away from the intoxication of forms and colors that pictorial tradition provides, these works place the aesthetic experience closer to minimalism.
The flowers are bathed in light that passes through their petals, causing them to glow. The simple compositions, treated like portraits, endow these flowers with great solidity and monumentality, and sometimes a sense of solitude, as they are not framed within other adornments.
If we are sufficiently aware, nearly all the themes addressed in this catalog are transformed by light, the solidity of volume, and the absence of distracting elements, allowing us to focus on meditating, feeling, listening, and analyzing the subject. Sometimes this is done with what we know or believe we know—the subjective, what we think about it—and other times with the imposition of reality and the objective.
These flowers are a tribute to an element laden with symbolism, but through a contemporary magnifying lens that focuses on the small and silent.
–Javier Arizabalo
