We are pleased to present the group exhibition Ce sont les fleurs qui ont changé, curated by Mathieu Mercier, in our gallery in Geneva.

“Ce sont les fleurs qui ont changé borrows part of its title from an exhibition of figurative painting organized by Hector Obalk at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2000. Mathieu Mercier, both artist and curator of this project, takes up the original premise while transforming its focus.

Flowers are a theme that is endlessly renewed. They have traversed the entire history of art — from Brueghel to Warhol, via Van Gogh and Monet — and remain, for that reason, an excellent indicator of shifting concepts. At times emblematic and vernacular (Florence Obrecht), vehicles for historical exploration (Olivier Masmonteil), figures of petrified classicism (Bertrand Lavier), symbols of geopolitical union (Franck Scurti), supports for a theory of color (Mathieu Mercier), hallucinatory (Hugues Reip), schizophrenic (Axel Pahlavi), evanescent (Michel Blazy), fleeting (Gregory Forstner), or liberators of pictorial energy (Gaël Davrinche), flowers lend themselves to an infinite variety of interpretations.

What is at stake here is not the evolution of techniques or styles, but a metamorphosis in our relationship to reality. The artists do not interpret the world — they test the very conditions of its appearance. From this perspective, to paint a flower is no longer to represent a subject or an object, but to question what, within the visible, continues to elude us.”

(Text by Mathieu Mercier)