LA ROSE EST SANS POURQUOI, Centre photographique, Rouen, Normandie

GRÉGOIRE ALEXANDRE, BRENDAN BARRY, VALÉRIE BELIN, LEENDERT BLOK, DAMIEN CADIO, PHILIPPE COGNÉE, ELSPETH DIEDERIX, SARAH MOON, JEAN-VINCENT SIMONET

During the last two years of his life, Édouard Manet produced sixteen small paintings of flower bouquets. In these modest formats, the painter of Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Olympia traces on canvas the same minimal 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, and we don’t see anything of the table in his Paris studio, which he can no longer leave while bedridden. The subject remains before him and us: the flower, or rather, what he has pursued all his life: the painting of the world. In these small canvases, in which he concentrates his last efforts, he summons all his painting skills to give existence to a flower “as much in the air and as much a flower as anything else, and yet painted in full solid paste”, as Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother after seeing one of these paintings.

La Rose est sans pourquoi brings together nine artists, photographers and painters who, for a time or for good, have made the flower a recurring motif in their work. The title borrows from a poem by the monk Angelus Silesius, taken from his masterpiece of 17th-century German literature: “The rose is without why, blooms because it blooms. Does not care for itself, does not wish to be seen.” The exhibition is dedicated to the flower as an epiphany of the living world, and to the humility it imposes on the artist who perseveres in representing it. Each artist takes inspiration from the sources of his or her medium – painting, photography, in other words paste, light, chemistry, ink – to create on canvas or print, as if by empathy, an encounter with this decidedly indifferent, free, evanescent flower.