REST IN ROSE / Marie Brines / 2024

 

As if after a restless night, my troubled mind emerges clouded, obsessed by the muffled message of distant songs it was unable to grasp. In this state of mind, everything around me was “too much”: baroque swirls of fluid, determined lines, sinuous movements intertwining arabesques, a pungent fragrance in granite whose origin could not be discerned. Rest in Rose is a passage that offers itself to my psyche, as if suddenly plunging into a place, ephemeral and fragile, to finally let go.

 

In this distortion of space and time, my visions remain very clear. The rose growers from Vénissieux visible in the image are planting new varieties of flowers at the 1930 Lyon Rose Show, whose immortal essence has since been petrified. But from the funeral urn to the luxurious bottle, little by little the scent comes back to life. Beyond the bright antechamber, a door sinks into the tumultuous shadows. And as my vision dims, the shapes overlap; so do their stories.

Dressed in long white dresses, allegorical figures in the style of Alphonse Mucha gather at the old cemetery in Vénissieux, right next to the art center that hosts us. Disembodied apparitions in the darkness, these three specters wander and turn while around them, as if by contrast, the space calms down into a regular field of roses. Thus, the “delight in the endless curve,” as André Breton might have described it, gives way to a horizon of meticulously aligned images. Their contrasting light, so dear to Brassaï, establishes a lasting nighttime atmosphere, while also enhancing the cemetery's roses. Fragmentary and truncated, they carry a mystery within them. From motif, they become a subject in their own right; but a secret subject, as if outside of reality. For, as Brassaï said, “the night suggests, it does not show.”
 

In the middle of this vibrant field, the extravagantly large floral bottle stands proudly as the backbone, the central pillar of an evanescent world. Transformed into ceramic, the frozen but still fragile earth will endure. Here, the history of plant forms becomes the pillar of the whole: from the naturalistic echoes of René Lalique to the vaporous reveries of Émile Gallé. But beyond the material and the forms, Florian Mermin evokes a world of sensations. Although the scent of this large empty bottle has long since disappeared, a subtle soundscape spreads out, like the backdrop to a song that will soon resonate. Abandoned on their stone beds, the three reclining muses will awaken frozen memories. Their lyrical song will pass through the sculptures, which have become megaphones, to bring forth, who knows, new varieties.

 

Yes, as if from a restless night, my troubled mind emerges obsessed with the muffled message of these distant songs that it could not catch. It plunges into the “sleep without sleep” that Dali spoke of and perceives the new sensations that inhabit it. In a state of hypnagogia, I feel I am in the best of both worlds, between wakefulness and sleep, quite aware of the free flow of thoughts and associations. Visions made of sounds, flashes, and colors mix the static images and animated sequences of my memories to create new ones.

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The invitation is simple: experience metamorphosis. Change state like matter, sound, scent.

Transform infinitely. Remain in Rose.

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MONDES SENSIBLES / Interview with Sandra Barré (extract) / 2024

Sandra Barré: Florian Mermin, for this exhibition focusing on the total art work, you are presenting the installation Le Spectre de la rose. It’s based on a poem by Théophile Gautier about the death of a rose worn on a young man’s jacket one evening at a ball. The scent of the rose embodies his ephemeral soul. Can you tell us more about why you wanted to work on this poem? And how did you transpose it in to a visual work?

Florian Mermin: It was the discovery of an evening dress that inspired me. It belongs to Ania Wozniak, an opera singer I’ve been working with for a number of years, and it is the purple-red colour in particular that caught my eye. It reminds me of the colour of a red rose. The poem, Le Spectre de la rose (The Spectre of the Rose) came to me through music, while I was researching pieces with emotions as the central theme. That is how I discovered Le Duo des fleurs by Léo Delibes, Le Chant à la lune by Antonìn Dvořák and Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix by Camille Saint-Saëns. As I continued my research into the presence of flowers in classical music, I came across the musical works of Hector Berlioz, and this poem. In it, the rose speaks in the first person, a dreamlike vision that highlights some of the fundamental research in my practice.
As Ania was the source of this dis- covery, it seemed natural to suggest that she should play the role of the spectre of the rose in my installation. Like the setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death”, in which each of the narrative rooms is identified by a different colour, the space I occupy in the exhibition invites the viewer to walk through dreamlike coloured surfaces, inspired by the singer’s clothing and make-up palettes. Against this chromatic backdrop, new sculptures in a variety of materials have been created: paintings made of rose petals and copper, and sculptures in terracotta that use the vocabulary of everyday objects (vases, potpourri, incense burner, candelabra). These elements, inspired by the shape of Ania’s jewellery, create a hollow portrait of her.

SB: I have the impression that this incarnation goes beyond the visual space, and there is also the presence of other senses such as hearing and smell that symbolise the spectre.

FM: For me, smell is very much linked to memories. For the Mondes Sensibles exhibition, I was able to develop a made-to-measure perfume with the perfumer Camille Chemardin and nose to nose with Ania to fill the space with a certain atmosphere: the vaporous, tactile and elusive atmosphere of the life of a rose, from the morning dew to its decline. It is a pungent smell that speaks of danger, of a disappearance and a ghost all at once. To create this perfume is to put oneself in the shoes of the man who picked the rose to go to the ball, and in another way, to follow in the footsteps of the murderer in Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume, who went to Grasse in search of the perfect fragrance. Making a perfume is a first for me. It’s a way of approaching one of my projects that involved different people, lots of discussions and fertile exchanges, and bypassed my usual way of working in the studio. The key imperative with the scent was that it should be as pleasant for Ania, who wears it during her perfor- mance at the museum, as it was for me and the visitors.
The singer will be present on a single occasion during the exhibition to sing “Le spectre de la rose”, the day of a flower in just 7 minutes. Perhaps this event will surprise the “Reveries of the Solitary Walker”. Apart from this event, Ania’s singing will be played in the exhibition. The memory of the singing is a fleeting, artificial moment in the same way as the scent of perfume. These elements allow me to introduce the notion of the infra-thin, a passage and a presence that interrupts time, into the heart of my work. Indeed, the singer’s kiss bit into the copper of a painting, evoking touch as well as taste and smell, in my opinion.

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​AN IMAGINARY GARDEN, A FOREST BORN OUT OF DREAMS (extract) / Christopher Yggdre / 2022

Crossing the threshold of Florian Mermin’s exhibition, Le Baiser de l’Araignée [The Spider’s Kiss], equals answering the artist’s invitation to delve deep in the folds and layers of one special tale. It is hybrid in nature, fantastical and baroque at the same time, and seemingly born out of dreams. In such a tale, the natural elements featured throughout the artist’s sculptures, installations, paintings, and performances, also invite us to explore all the mysterious ramifi­cations the world creates when it trembles.

The art of Florian Mermin emulates the art of storytelling. It draws on visual and sensual narratives that summon and iterate motifs like forests or gardens, celebrating them as integral parts of the great narrative of the world rather than mere settings for our actions. Mermin uses materials that unmistakably connect his art­ works to those of Arte Povera: dried rose petals, reclaimed wood, terracotta, native copper, etc.; the metaphors and symbols that he crafts pertain more to the poetic force of Romanticism; formal aspects of his artworks also establish, unexpectedly, a filiation with Fantastic art and its offsprings, among which Surrealism. Taken as a whole, Mermin’s work relates to Baroque aesthetics
in the sense of being excessive, following the definition that many authors, including Eugenio d’Ors and Édouard Glissant, have given of them: “a powerful breath of life that carries art forms away in an expressivist whirlwind, from one era to the other.”

Le Baiser de l’Araignée proceeds from an invitation Florian Mermin extended to two opera singers, Amelia Feuer and Ania Wozniak, asking them to bring their presence and voice to the exhibition space. The artist has taught the singers the basics of pottery: this initiation of sorts has allowed them to create two artifacts in the shape of vases that become acoustic horns capable of amplifying voices and, in this case, their singing. The source of this singing would be Feuer’s and Wozniak’s lips: their imprints have been engraved on copper, bringing symbolic kisses to mind. The singers’ perfumes subtly pervade and linger in the exhibition space. They are to sing the “Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ 19th­century opera Lakmé, though it has been stripped bare of all the orientalist flourishes it originally featured, in favor of its play on imitative harmonies and its lovely dialogue for soprano and mezzo­so­ prano that lauds how the vegetal and animal realms connect and collide near the river: “under the thick dome where white jasmine and rose gather, on the flowery bank, laughing in the morn, come, let’s go together...” Opera singing can be seen as the art of trembling, of vibrating—vibratos and tremolos are among its most elementary manifestations. Mermin’s Le Baiser de l’Araignée invites us to remember the original bond between the very first myths and singing: such singing, inalienably, is the expres­ sion of the world trembling and vibrating.

Our preposterous and boisterous claims to envi­ ronmental domination have made us forget the subtle yet vital relationships through which we join all living things in unison. Florian Mermin’s Le Baiser de l’Araignée aims to remedy such oversight in welcoming us to an artwork made place: an imaginary garden, a forest born out of dreams, and a liminal space that is both a frontier and a place to explore. That is to say, an ecotone: taken from landscape ecology studies, the term describes a transition zone between two different ecosystems. By definition, the ecotone is in motion and transitory, hyphena­ ting species and landscapes. Mermin’s ecotone is a metaphorical one, creating a surprising and lively union whose emblem is the kiss, whose host is the spider, and whose language is opera singing. I like to think that the inclusion of opera singing in his installation expresses the artist’s will to create a total work of art or Gesamtkunstwerk, without ever sacrificing the wonderful to the rational, the intimate to the global, or the real to the fantastical. It is only natural that opera singing burst in Mermin’s artistic work: it adds decisively to the creation of an artwork­tale, the setup for a narrative that can become the work in itself.

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​CARESSE DE FORÊT (LE SOIR OÙ TU M'AS QUITTÉ) (extract) / Guitemie Maldonado / 2019

In the universe Florian Mermin has created, spiders' legs end in pointed nails, benches bristle with spikes and tree trunks are covered in hairs. In short, everything is subjected to transformation. Dishes, a screen, pegs, flowerpots and curtains form a setting that is both indoors and outdoors, evoking interior design and the cinema – plenty of films spring to mind on viewing it. For although the objects could possibly be functional, what they are primarily doing is playing a role, creating a familiar mood, romantic or horrific, now sympathetic and now unsettling, compelling or repellent, or – often – all at the same time. It is unsurprising that some people associate them with personal memories, from childhood for instance, or with literary reminiscences, necessarily poetic in nature.

They emit an ambivalence rooted primarily in the techniques and materials the artist uses; the forged metal and terracotta imply both skill and unpredictability. They are the fruit of a desire for form and embracing accidents. Their surfaces, ranging from shiny to dull, smooth to coarse, suggest a whole array of sensations. The same applies to the doormats – who can describe the scratchy nature of a doorstep? Is that where the tender promise of Home Sweet Home resides? – and the furs which plunge us into a world of appearances and imitations. The former include unusually-shaped bristled mats which bring to mind dry grass that has turned brown, as they are here, or green grass, the impossible dream of a lawn that resists abrasion. The latter, whether natural or synthetic, come to the aid of humans struggling hopelessly with biting cold, restoring a protective layer that has fallen away over the course of evolution. What we thus see here is the barriers between species dropping away, an intertwining of nature and artifice; the objects are ordinary or even domestic, because they can be found in the home, but more especially because the wildness in them has been tamed and might well be ready to resurface at any moment. This instability and sweeping motion ushers in a profound questioning of how our relationship to the world is ordered: is the world at our disposal – as humans have always seemed to believe – or is it simply playing along with our little game for a limited period? Is it at one with our frame of mind, or does it project itself in us and express its unspoken movements through us?

The installation created by Florian Mermin for the gallery entrance would seem to provide a good starting point for answering these questions: we tread on the earth, paying attention to the sensations it arouses in us, the colour, unusual for the floor of an exhibition space, the elasticity and sinking-in, the muffled sound, the smell of soil. We believe that we leave our mark on it, even though it is quickly covered up and obliterated, while the earth clings to our soles and accompanies us surreptitiously, making us the vehicle for its dissemination throughout the space. Which begs the question, who is using whom in a story that is as old as the earth itself? And are not our destinies linked by something more than a relationship rooted in domination? What we have thus have here is an incitement to modesty and consideration, or even solidarity.