In the tombs of kings and high Mayan dignitaries « the killed plates » (plates with holes in them) accompanied the deceased. In this funeral ritual, the Maya considered the object as a living being whose perforation freed its soul in order to be able to make the offering.

The motif of the toile de Jouy allows us to adapt the plate « offering » to our Western history.

The toile de Jouy created under Louis XV very fashionable in the nobility and the French upper middle class in the early eighteenth century will consecutively embellish the court of kings and salons.

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Since the dawn of time, through ritual or cult practices, often linked to shamanism, man has created objects made from human skulls or tibia.

With Corine Borgnet it is not a question of human bones but of animals and particularly of birds. 

These animal fragments acquire a form of sacredness by being elevated to the rank of work of art, they are transmuted from a banal material into a noble subject as if under the effect of alchemy.

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According to an approach initiated at the end of the 90s, which is based on the observation of the plant kingdom and its imaginary transposition into the digital universe, Miguel Chevalier is the creator of various virtual herbariums and gardens.
Nemophila Libertia of Elsa Triolet is a virtual flower extracted from the virtual herbarium Fractal Flowers.
This flower in homage to the writer Elsa Triolet, is at the edge of four worlds: plant, mineral, animal and robotic. The flowers born of digital germination, unfold incredible forms, undulate at the mercy of a virtual wind that we do not feel, before disappearing before our eyes to make way for others.
We pass from teeming universes to moments where nature seems to enter a phase of winter rest. The flowers have at the same time a real monumentality by their geometrical forms and at the same time an evanescent aspect when, in some seconds, they evaporate in the air.
This living painting exerts a disturbing fascination on the spectator. This work hypnotizes the eye in a dazzling dialectic between the real and the virtual.

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Quinquina diaspora questions the very anthropocentric tendency that dominates the discourse on the representation of plant life in humans. Quinquina diaspora also explores the memory of the cinchona in Cameroon, the complex history of its forced migration through colonisation to the grassfields occupied for centuries by the great group of Bamileke peoples.

— Aude Christel Mgba

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[Excerpt: Catalogue produced for the exhibition Didier L’Honorey, Variété florale : oxygénante culture, from March 19 to April 30, 2011]
© The authors, Villa Tamaris art center, La Seyne-sur-Mer 2011
Text written by Alain MONVOISIN – « A VENTRILOQUE’S WALK IN THE MODERNISTIC GARDEN (of the well said and the badly done) »

[…] In the case of L’Honorey, and to paraphrase Thomas Bernhard who lends to a fantasy Emmenuel Kant sailing on a raging sea the unusual reflexion « Seasickness is the proof of everything », the flower which, as we understand it, plays an allegorical role, would be the proof, if not of everything, at least of a part of the modernist whole.
Honorey would not paint flowers, he would have set himself the strange task, the undoubtedly very obsolete gageur, to paint the modern painting…

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True to his propensity to apprehend in the same vision, the interior and exterior of objects, beings and the world, Nicolas Rubinstein presents here « wounded trunks » that skillfully blend plant structure and human structure.

Imbued with ecological sensitivity, these pieces translate both the artist’s research on the vibrations induced by the alignment of vertebrae, and his reflections on the anthropocene and the damage caused by man on his environment.

Open wound of the living or highlighting of a hidden structure which can straighten the world, the visitor will judge…