ALice Denision: Mal De Fleur

On View: September 3 – 28, 2019
Reception: Friday, September 6, 6 – 8 pm

“Up until the fall of 2016, I had been working with enthusiasm on paintings that were heavily patterned and exuberant; in November I faced a crisis and couldn’t go on.  I was again wrestling with this:

 What is the point of making the kind of work I make in the kind of world I’m in?

 Months later I visited Lisbon, where I was reintroduced to the history of November 1, 1755—All Saints Day—when an enormous earthquake struck the city followed by tsunamis and a fire, all but destroying it.  I reread Candide, which Voltaire wrote in response to the disaster. In this satire, Dr. Pangloss is Candide’s mentor, who teaches him that everything happens for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds.  Candide struggles to apply his mentor’s philosophy, through mostly hideous and violent adventures.  Ultimately, Candide rejects his mentor’s philosophy and adopts this one: tend to your own garden. 

The Pangloss paintings are influenced by Candide, the spirit of Gaudi’s Park Guell, and tapestries and frescos.  I’ve always been drawn to mille fleurs backgrounds.  The plants are real—that is, they are meant to be identifiable—but they are coming out of my head.  They are painted in overlapping layers, out of scale, and all in bloom at once—because why not plant everywhere?” - Alice Denison