Landscapes With Flowers
23 June 2023 – 19 August 2023
Sébastien Bertrand is pleased to present Landscapes With Flowers, Michael Hilsman’s fifth solo show at the gallery.
The three large and four small works in the exhibition feature swaths of flowers ‘luminous and serene’ whose function is not to provide depictions of specific flora but to create wild, exuberant masses of color. Referencing Gustav Klimt’s ornamental symbolism, the flowers serve as theatrical backdrops which mimic the wild patterns of folk tapestries or decorative textiles, knitted together to vibrate with an almost psychedelic power.
Hilsman’s work frequently features figurative elements, but in Landscape With Flowers And Apples and Landscape With Flowers And Things, the flowers themselves become the protagonist in lieu of the absent body. The hills are alive, and maybe the figure has completed its life cycle, is buried in the ground, and, as they say, is “pushing up daisies.” Despite their raucous color palette, these landscapes are contemplative spaces where one might understand the “language of flowers and silent things.”
In the smaller works, flowers pose along human body parts and diverse objects drawn from the lexicon that reappears in Hilsman’s paintings: ears, teeth, bones, feet, hammers, matches, apples, lemons, cigars, glasses. The recurring fragmented figure – sometimes hidden, sometimes amputated – conveys a sense of vulnerability, awkwardness, and mortality. Even the paintings without a figure carry the feeling of an absent body through an array of elements that assemble into a symbolic cast of inanimate characters.
Flowers as an idea, with their endless historical associations to sex, death, love, or vanity, seem in Hilsman’s work to most represent a relationship to the impermanence of time and the physical world. These works transport us outside the temporal restrictions of daily life and its realities. As it is to the daydreamer lying in a field, linear time is a foreign concept in these works. The fields of flowers under cerulean blue skies conjure Ferdinand The Bull dreaming the day away or the age-old adage to “stop and smell the flowers.”
Michael Hilsman, Landscape With Flowers And Feet, 2023
“Beyond the vast sorrows and all the vexations
That weigh upon our lives and obscures our vision,
Happy is he who can with his vigorous wing
Soar up towards those fields luminous and serene,
He whose thoughts, like skylarks,
Toward the morning sky take flight
– Who hovers over life and understands with ease
The language of flowers and silent things!”
2023
Oil on linen
28 x 36 cm / 11 x 14 in.
MH-2309