I’ve been working on a series of watercolors called ‘BÖSE BLUMEN’, a lovely crude
translation of ‘Fleurs du Mal’ (or Evil Flowers – Flowers of Evil).
The paintings depict anthropomorphic flowers, often the blue poppy, with wild-eyed faces and sharp teeth. They are cute, unhinged, lonely, desperate, thirsty.
Their faces borrow from memes (like the “I am not asking anymore” one), movie stills or emojis – one source of inspiration was a meme page which rated the hot emoji variations from different devices – the android one was described as “hngnn I am a thirsty little flower and you have to water me with [redacted]”).
I structure my work by creating sort of moodboards in magazine form or ‘manuals’ for myself. They consist of sketches, written notes and pictures glued in. These are sourced from other artists work I admire, movie stills of interest, or textures that evoke a specific memory.
A potent source are low-brow books on hobby artist techniques as well as the works of Henry Darger, George Barbier, Heather Benjamin or Simon Hanselmann.
This sourcing and sorting is an important part of my work.
The flower I depict the most, the blue poppy, is only found on the flanks of the Himalaya.
It is also the national flower of the Kingdom of Bhutan – the one country which put as its national goal the happiness of its people. Close by are also vast fields of red and pink poppies, the source of opium – i.e. heroin; a flowery symbol of global conflict and necro-capitalism.
But another fascinating aspect of the blue poppy is its similar function to the black swan.
The black swan theory describes the possibility of a totally unexpected event as still one possible outcome, even though it has been deemed impossible.
An illustration of that idea is found in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”.
In his 2019 video essay “Nothing Is Written... Or What Gives Me Hope”, G. Belvedere recounts an iconic scene from that film, the moment when Lawrence returns from the desert to the oasis:
“(...) before quenching his obvious deep thirst, [Lawrence] tells Ali once more: ‘Nothing is
written’. It is a powerful scene. This impresses Ali enough, that he remarks to Lawrence
later: ‘Truly, for some men, nothing is written unless they wrote it.’ (...) too often, people
point to tendencies and practices, as if they’d represent absolute truth, and this mantra can
help us test these artificial boundaries; in the political and economic spheres in particular,
we see people simply accepting the state of human affairs as natural, and unchangeable. (...)”
In 2019, I took a sharp turn from my previous, more abstract work. I leaned into my earliest and most personal sources of inspiration: Weird puppets from children’s TV-shows, emotive catholic imagery, fairy tale narratives, and the language of internet subcultures.
In making BÖSE BLUMEN, I hope to synthesize these influences, but mostly, to give form to this voice that says:
Truly, nothing is written.
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