La Rose est sans pourquoi

Grégoire Alexandre, Brendan Barry, Valérie Belin, Leendert Blok, Damien Cadio, Philippe Cognée, Elspeth Diederix, Sarah Moon, Jean-Vincent Simonet

Over the last two years of his life, Édouard Manet produced sixteen small paintings of bouquets of flowers. In these modest formats, the painter of Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia rendered on canvas the same minimalist composition, simple in appearance: a bouquet arranged in a glass or crystal vase. Roses, tulips, lilacs, peonies: the flowers vary, as does the shape of the vase. The framing is tight; we see nothing of the table in his Parisian studio, from which, bedridden, he can no longer rise. Before him and us remains his subject: the flower, or rather, what he pursued throughout his life, the painting of the world. In these small canvases, on which he concentrates his final efforts, he draws upon his entire craft as a painter to bring to life a flower “as ethereal and as much a flower as anything else, and yet painted in thick, solid impasto”, wrote Vincent Van Gogh to his brother after seeing one of these paintings.

La Rose est sans pourquoi brings together nine artists—photographers and painters—who, whether temporarily or over the long term, have made the flower a recurring motif in their work. The title is taken from a poem by the monk Angelus Silesius, drawn from his magnum opus and a masterpiece of 17^th-century German literature: ‘The rose is without why, blooms because it blooms. It cares not for itself, nor does it wish to be seen.” The exhibition is thus dedicated to the flower, viewed as an epiphany of the living world, and to the humility it imposes on the artist who perseveres in depicting it. Each artist draws upon the sources of their chosen medium—painting, photography, be it paint, light, chemistry or ink—to bring about, as if through empathy, an encounter on the canvas or print with this decidedly indifferent, free and evanescent flower.