FLEURSDUMAL - Curated by Dolly Thompsett

About

‘The beautiful is always strange', said Baudelaire. The artists in this show demonstrate within their painterly flourishes a strange beauty that alludes to a sense of corruption and to the festering nature of an often hidden aspect of human consciousness. The work selected relates to Baudelaire's collection of 19th century poems ‘Les Fleurs du mal' by embracing an awareness of death, degeneracy and pain. The six artists in the exhibition have developed visual vocabularies that echo Baudelaire's syntax in order to elucidate something, something that speaks most strangely of beauty. Within these paintings a moment of expression is fashioned by means of art that truly speaks of life, like a briefly blossoming flower that feeds from the decomposing carcasses of beasts, great and small, and from the sun above. Dolly Thompsett