NOIR FLORAL

NOIR FLORAL

From August 31 to October 1, 2017

Sébastien Pesot’s approach focusses on exploring the plasticity and signification of contemporary images. In this investigation, the flower is torn from its natural environment and staged against a neutral background. Without being first captured by a camera, it is isolated, decontextualized and magnified. Alluding to the famous Baudelaire poetry collection «Les Fleurs du mal» (The Flowers of Evil), the body of work Mal floral shown in 2015 raised the question of the beautiful in current art. This reference to Baudelaire was ironic, as the poet had a deep aversion for photography, a new medium at the time.

The body of work entitled Noir floral extends this investigation by questioning the aesthetic duel provoked by the decontextualization of the subject. Through computer graphic processing, the flowers are printed on paper but also etched in stone. The delicacy of the subject matter is in stark contrast with the hardness of the support on which it is immortalized. In this, these flowers echo Baudelaire’s work, his way of holding together opposites (good and evil, ugliness and beauty, the eternal and the fleeting, etc.) and of enhancing the uncanniness of the world through synesthetic play.

At the crossroads of realism and abstraction, this work thus puts forward an unusual view of the world, a play on captured beauty and its representation.

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