COLLAGE SERIES ~ 2019 - 2021

Flesh, Marble, Flower, Venus, it´s you I believe in.
- Arthur Rimbaud, from Selected Poems & Letters; “The Blacksmith”

The relationship between nature and man is a complex matter and requires some narratives. "Ovid's Garden" is the title of the 16-part collage series and refers to Ovid's cycle of poems whose imagery has permeated the entire visual culture over the centuries. The images show motivic fragments from different contexts and cultures and skilfully blend the present with ancient and modern mythologies from all continents. These motifs, found in historical archives, in everyday life or in the digital flow of images, thus all break free from the linear course of time and assemble themselves almost somnambulistically into new visual metamorphoses.

The works were created 2019 in the guest studio of the Province of Upper Austria in Paliano near Rome and 2021 at the Villa Lena Art Foundation in Palaia near Florence.

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Fleisch, Marmor, Blume, Venus, an dich glaube ich.
- Arthur Rimbaud, aus Ausgewählte Gedichte und Briefe; "Der Schmied,"

Das Verhältnis zwischen Natur und Mensch ist eine komplexe Angelegenheit und bedarf einiger Narrative. «Ovids Garden» lautet der Titel der 16-teiligen Collagenserie und nimmt Bezug auf Ovids Gedichtzyklus, dessen Bilderwelt über die Jahrhunderte hinweg die gesamte visuelle Kultur durchdrungen hat. Die Bilder zeigen motivische Fragmente aus verschiedenen Kontexten und verblenden geschickt die Gegenwart mit der antiken Mythologie. Diese in historischen Archiven, im Alltag oder im digitalen Bilderfluss gefundenen Motive lösen sich so allesamt aus dem linearen Zeitverlauf heraus und assemblieren sich nahezu traumwandlerisch zu neuen visuellen Metamorphosen.

Die Arbeiten entstanden 2019 im Gastatelier des Landes Oberösterreich in Paliano bei Rom, und 2021 in der Villa Lena Art Foundation in Palaia bei Florenz.

01 ETRUSCO ~ Acrylic on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019*
Horta is the Etruscan Goddess of gardens. Horta's name however is Latin, not Etruscan, and is related to hortus, "garden", "kitchen garden", or "park", and shares its roots with the Latin family name Horace or Horatio, the Etruscan form of that name being Hurtate. The Latin word has of course also given us our word "horticulture", meaning "the cultivation of a garden". Besides her name and the assumptions that go with its definition, not much is known of her.

02 NEBAMUN ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2021
The garden fresco fragment from the tomb of Nebamun in Thebes, Egypt, is one of the oldest depictions of a garden. Nebamun's garden in the afterlife is not unlike the earthly gardens of the wealthy Egyptians. The pond is populated by birds and fish and surrounded by flower borders and shady rows of trees. The fruit trees include figs and date palms.

03 TRITOMA ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2021
Plants are the most instrumentalised of all life forms, they are degraded and overlooked - rethinking our relationship with them needs to be understood as part of a broader rethinking of our relationship with each other. What does the rocket flower in your garden mean?

04 CACTUS ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019
Cacti shaped the landscape of historical Palestine. Traditionally, they were planted to demarcate land. Especially on the mountain slopes, rows of cacti separated the orchards and olive groves, thus serving as border markers and protective fences at the same time.

05 DAPHNE ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2021*
In Greek mythology, Daphne is the embodiment of the laurel. When the god Apollo pursued her, Daphne prayed to her father to save her, whereupon she was transformed into a laurel. This myth can be read from different angles: as a woman who is silenced forever and can only "speak" through the rustling of the leaves, or as a woman who saves herself by transforming herself into nature. At the very least, however, it can be understood as a message to trust one's instincts and retain self-determination over one's own body.
After a painting by Pyke Koch

06 LIMONI ~ Acrylic & gold on paper,18x13 cm, framed, 2021
There is a story about how the citrus plants came to Europe: The legend of the theft of the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides by the ancient hero Heracles. In the mid-16th century, this heroic deed of Heracles was finally associated with a real-life citrus collection. A poem written for Duke Cosimo I de Medici described how Heracles had stolen the Golden Apples and finally brought them to the Medici garden in Florence. As in antiquity, this story was embellished further and further by various authors during the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Once the daughters of Hesperides brought the fruit to Mantua, then to Rome and finally to Nuremberg. And always, with their help, a paradisiacal garden was created, adorned with numerous citrus plants grown in pots. Heracles, however, was not only the courageous ancient demigod who had performed countless heroic deeds, but also became the identification figure of baroque rulers. Large collections of citrus plants were created in many European princely gardens, and orangery buildings were erected for their overwintering. The ancient hero Heracles became a popular motif for garden sculptures and the copies of the ancient statue of Heracles Farnese, which can still be found in numerous gardens today - recall the legend of the theft of the Golden Apples.

07 PASSIFLORA ~ Acrylic & gold on paper,18x13 cm, framed, 2021
For the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas, the luminous flower circle of the passion flower was particularly suitable for invoking the sun, because passion flower leaves and seeds provide an extract with a sleep-inducing effect, so that they are still used today as a remedy for states of restlessness and thus provide prudence. When the conquistadors arrived, they saw symbols of their faith in these extraordinary flowers, which is why the "passion flower" is a Catholic allusion to the Passion of Jesus. Their fascination with this flower must have led the natives to transform the mythology they already possessed about it into a Catholic design. Such transformations allowed them to secretly continue to worship those they had always worshipped.

08 PESCA ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019
Somewhere in northern Italy, in the mid-1980s, under a shimmering summer sun. Again and again, the camera's gaze pans to the juicy peaches in the fruit trees. They play a leading role in Luca Guadagnino's film "Call Me by Your Name", first on the metaphorical level of an intellectual conversation in the course of which Oliver deduces the etymological origin of the word "peach". And then later in a much more explicit way in the narrative of desire.

09 ENGLISH GARDEN ~ Acrlic on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019
The ideal of the English garden was to approximate wild nature, i.e. a "wildness" perceived through the conceptual apparatus of Romantic sensibility. This gives rise to what amounts to an aesthetic tautology: the desire to transform the landscape into a garden that resembles the landscape.
Allen S. Weiss, Mirror of Infinity

10 JARDINERO ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2021
"Now I'll tell you how to recognise a real gardener. "You must visit me sometime," he says, "I would like to show you my garden. If you follow this invitation to please him, you will find his backside sticking out somewhere between perennials. "I'll be right there," he calls over his shoulder, "I'm just planting this." "Don't mind me," you reply amiably. After a while the time should have come; he rises, stretches out his dirty hand in greeting and says with joy, "Now come and look around; the garden is small, but... just a moment," he whispers, bending down to one of the beds to pluck out a few blades of grass. "Just come closer. I'll show you a Dianthus musalae, you'll be amazed. Goodness, I forgot to loosen the soil again!" he growls and begins to poke around. ... Whereupon you tiptoe away ..."
Karel Capek, "The Year of the Gardener "Karel Čapek, 1926

11 PALIANO ~ Acrlic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019
He becomes aware, for the first time in his life, of the beauty of flowers. He remembers harbouring a near-hatred of them as an adolescent. It seemed absurd that anyone should take joy in something so small and so temporary when there were surely, greater, more permanent things on which to pin ambitions. He himself wanted glory and intensity. To be detained by a flower was a symbol of a dangerous resignation. Now he is beginning to get the point. The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with dissapointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a primrose. But once we realize that the larger dreams are always compromised in some way, with what gratitude we may turn to these minuscule islands of serene perfection and delight."
Alain de Botton ~ The Course of Love

12 PALM ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019*
The truth is that palms have always been rich carriers of ideas. In contemporary culture, the palm tree continues to be used not only as shorthand for earthly paradises but also to symbolyse the threat of their imminent violation - as the American writer Carl Hiaasen puts it, "the first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind". In Christian tradtition the palm appears as an emblem of the victory of the faithful, of the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, of peace and of eternal life. In the Quran the palm features in the paradisiacal imagery of the Garden, while Muhammad is said to have built his home out of palm trees. For the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans and Egyptians it was variously representative of victory, fertility, long life and immortality. For the Mesopotamians and Assyrians the palm was one of the great sacred trees, connecting heaven at its crown with Earth at the base of its trunk.

13 ELDORADO ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019
In the 16th century, mysterious reports about the legendary "Eldorado" in Colombia appeared. This myth is rooted in the ritual ceremonies of the indigenous Muisca people. During these rites, people would embark on a raft that sailed across a lake to sink gold and precious stones as offerings. This highly symbolic act fuelled the Spanish explorers' conviction that the continent must be brimming with gold. For many centuries, conquistadors and adventurers roamed forests and swamps in their deluded belief, leaving devastation in their wake and often ultimately losing themselves in their treacherous quest. Over time, the term became synonymous with an unreachable dreamland, a paradise that escapes human longing.

14 CAMPO ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019
"Gardening is an uncovering of worlds - of worlds within worlds - and this begins with the world at your feet. To develop an awareness of what you are treading on, you need to delve into the organic underworld of the soil, to appreciate in a committed way the potential of the soil to allow life to flourish."
Robert Harrison, Gardens - An Essay on the Human Condition, 2008

15 OMBRA ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2019*
The Mediterranean landscape is dominated by the sun. It casts the outlines of objects and plants on the coloured walls. This creates ephemeral paintings and the more you pay attention, the more you find yourself in a large impressionist museum.
"The eye archives the miracle of opening the soul to that, which is not the soul, the blissful world of things and their god, the sun."
Maurice Merleau Ponty

16 MARMO ~ Acrylic & gold on paper, 18x13 cm, framed, 2021
"Flesh, Marble, Venus, Flower - it´s you I believe in." Arthur Rimbaud, The Blacksmith; Sun and Flesh, 1870
Although the work is unmistakably Rimbaud, it shows the influence that both Romanticism and Latin writers had on his style. It takes the tone of a hymn to the sun and the earth - with blatant sexual undertones - that periodically turns into a lament about the abyss that separates man from nature, abruptly recalling the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in Ovid's Metamorphoses. A young man tries to kiss a marble statue awake. Every pleasure garden bears an ancient heart.

*in a private collection