"[…] he had the sensation of entering a greenhouse again. Tall palm trees opened their elegant leaves in the other corners of the room, rose to the ceiling, then widened into jets of water. On both sides of the fireplace, rubber trees, round like columns, stacked their long, dark green leaves one on top of the other, and on the piano two unknown shrubs, round and covered in flowers, one all pink and the other all white, looked like artificial plants, improbable, too beautiful to be true." - Guy de Maupassant, Bel Ami.
In the tradition of the orangeries that appeared in the 16th century, winter gardens spread with the rise of industrial metal architecture and Art Nouveau-style glass roofs in the 19th century. This heated pleasure room, which overlooks the garden or the park, was then in vogue in bourgeois homes. Collections of exotic plants and indoor palm trees are kept there.
Over the years, the winter garden has become a living space in its own right, a reception area where you can read, play cards, admire the plants, or simply converse.
In this group show, the 8 artists build together and in their own way all the elements of an idealized winter garden, from which the visitor will never want to leave.
Julien Colombier and Tara Msellati pose the central elements: fantasized exotic plant compositions. Soft and soothing, drawn with oil pastels, they seem to float in space in Colombier. For his part, Msellati makes them enveloping and warm in the form of installations made of real plants, as if arranged on century-old rocks.
Colombe Salvaresi covers an entire wall, from floor to ceiling, with her wool "shaped canvases", hybrid works between fresco, tapestry and painting. They appeal to several of the visitor's senses, including touch, which here allows access to a feeling of comforting softness.
With her still lifes mixing photography and stained glass, Violaine Carrère's work evokes the glass roof, so symbolic of the winter garden, but with an ultra-contemporary aesthetic resulting from macro shots, structuring her compositions.
For her part, Perrine Boudy offers ceramics in the shape of antique vases and jars and watercolors with lively and loose gestures. These works constitute a choice decor for our indoor garden which, thanks to her, takes root in an even more remote era, that of Greco-Roman civilization.
Grimacing faces, small thieving, ticklish, fine and mischievous hands, Makiko Furuichi adds a whole tragicomic living world in watercolor. This universe is known in Japan as niyari. Here it brings to the garden an inhabited atmosphere, tinged with amusement and curiosity.
It is Olivia de Bona who populates our winter garden increasingly teeming with human figures and more precisely feminine. Made in straw marquetry, her works add a touch of sophisticated naturalness. The artist thus brings back to the page and with taste an almost forgotten technique and a fascinating meticulousness..
To finish, Victoire Kammermann seems to encapsulate with her works in varied mediums (dry pastel, oil pastel and even nail polish) the essence of the winter garden: a moment of happiness and voluptuousness, suspended in time.
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