Fractal Flowers In Vitro 2008
Miguel Chevalier
Software : Cyrille Henry
Installation in front of the Town Hall of the Fourth District of Paris
December 16th, 2008 to January 11th, 2009
Strange flowers grow in a mini architecture of light. They are born, grow up, undulating with the wind that we can't feel, bend toward us without breaking their fragile articulated stem, and disappear in into a space where our eye can't penetrate, to leave space for others. Their fast and hypertrophic growth monumentalizes them. At the foot of this immense flora wall, with vivid colors, we feel that we are as small as Alice in Wonderland. This then allows us dream… couldn't it be said that all these flowers are watching us and by their slow swing; they invite us to join them. How can we resist their call?
While recognizing that it is an illusion, we are tempted to pass to the other side of the luminous wall that protects their liberty, to enter the garden that conceals the mysteries of this generation to which we are not strangers, for these flowers react to our movements. In the generative and chromatic language which is theirs, they dialogue with us. They answer us. They also question us by their unusual apparition. They tell us that they come from elsewhere, from a possible world, different from ours, where vegetation obeys other rules of growth. A world where, vegetation has escaped from the organic shapes in which we confine it. As if a geometrician nature had transformed their germen into an algorithm. Instead of the rounded petals, broken and sharp edges that recall those of crystals. Instead of sweet softness of the corollas, an entanglement of unequal prisms in unlikely colors. One would believe that they are obtained through the mirrors of a kaleidoscope, was this not the poverty of this metamorphic process that knows only symmetry. These flowers ignore this boring regularity. They don't stop evolving according to random movements that anamorphose and metamorphose them, by becoming complicated at every stage their intelligent geometry. The result is spectacular. What are they? Are they fossil flowers, which have just awoken from their long sleep by a magician poet or tomorrow’s flowers, born out of calculation, as well as the mastery of matter and shapes of the spirit? The formal relationship of these floral architectures with all the crystalloid rocks, questions the border between the reigns and it blurs our references. And we contemplate these and are amazed by this molecular anatomy that unites the vegetal and mineral elements in the beauty and the fragility and it celebrates this union by an explosion of color.
text by Françoise Gaillard