BE THEREThe Flowers Of Evils Still Bloom/Spleen: Les Fleurs du MalPresented by Cueto Project November 6, 2008- January 31, 2009Reception: November 6, 6:00 pm - 9:00 pmArman, Artists Anonymous, Bachelot Caron, Thomas Couture, Rina Banerjee, Hans Bellmer, William Blake, Jacob Boeskov, Hieronymous Bosch, Rodolphe Bresdin, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Camille Claudel, Nicolas Darrot, Damien Deroubaix, Jeanne Detallante, Albretch Dürer, James Ensor, Laurent Esquerré, Lin Esser, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir, Léon Gérôme, Claudia Huidobro, Natacha Ivanova, Max Klinger, Louis, Auguste Mathieu Legrand, Thomas Lerooy, Lucien Levy-Dhumer, Fernand Khnopff, Gustav Klimt, John Martin, Pierre Molinier - Gustave Adolphe Mossa, Gustave Moreau, Florence Obrecht, Axel Pahlavi, Bruno Perramant, Sabine Pigalle, Paul Elie Ranson, Odilon Redon, Auguste Rodin, Félicien Rops, Tanja Roscic, Boo Saville, Stephane Sednaoui, Loredana Sperini, Edouard Stellmacher, Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir aka Shoplifter, Marko Velk, Franz von Stück, Jean Luc Verna, Vuk Vidor, Joel Peter Witkin, Viktor WyndOne wants from works of art to rescue the sick, poor, and dying men from the long funerary roads of humanity for a small moment of pleasure: one [work of art] offers to them a little intoxication and madness Friedrich Nietzsche “Hallucinations, dreamlike deliriums, morbid elegance… It is a true Pandora's box of images prohibited by society’s rules of good taste and morals that the exhibition opens with delight. Mirror of the innermost depth of the heart at the end of the nineteenth century, Symbolism remains a case of resonance of the doubts, concerns, vertigo of our time. The luminous introduction, highlighted with walls of gold, calls on the infamous Sphynx as illustrated by Gustave Moreau and his devious questioning, drowned in an effete world seen by William Blake pit against the burlesque of the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Evasive and fleeing, the threatening dance of the riders in Dürer’s Apocalypse, the visitor plunges into the frenzy of murders ritualized and aestheticized by Bachelot Caron. Hardly the time for a respite, one is taken by the wild exuberance of Shoplifter and the black despair of Marko Velk. The course invites one to discover an archipelago of singularities where the craniums of Vuk Vidor informally address a skeleton of Klinger, or a Roy Johnson dialog with Damien Deroubaix. [The exhibition] finally concludes with the bed of Arman where Eros gives her hand to Thanatos, where the promise of pleasure is related to “La Petite Mort” of Axel Pahlavi, with the delighted abandonments of Adolphe Mossa, with the phallic deliriums of Bellmer.” Roxana Azimi “Since my school years when I studied symbolism with Mme Geneviève Lacambre (former curator at the Gustave Moreau Museum) at l’École du Louvre, I have been passionate about this multiple-faceted artistic movement. For me, Symbolism opened Pandora’s box of forbidden images by revealing to my eyes reality in its gritty particularity and those representations hidden by the ideal and the moral. During a casual conversation with my journalist friend Roxana Azimi last May, we mentioned the revival of the Symbolist movement within the works of the Surrealists as well as in many artists’ works of our contemporary era. This discussion developed into an intense exchange of ideas from which was born the exhibit concept for "The Flowers of Evil Still Bloom/Spleen: les Fleurs du Mal." The idea is to transform the 4,000 ft of my gallery, located in the heart of the New York City Chelsea art district at 551 W 21st, into a Symbolist apartment. Each room, the walls covered in black, blue, gold, red, and purple respectively, will be inspired by a key character of the symbolist imaginary. The exhibition will begin with a dedication to Baudelaire, from whose poetry was derived the impetus for the Symbolist movement and the title for this show. The first room will be adorned in gold, representative of the luxury and sensuality that was essential in the mind of Baudelaire, as well as to Oedipus and to the Sphynx, messenger of intriguing questions. Beyond this room will be the dining room of Des Esseintes from Joris-Karl Huysmans’ great novel À Rebours, the bedroom of Edgar Allan Poe, Freud’s psychoanalytic cabinet of Gradiva, and Dorian Gray’s library as described in Oscar Wilde’s celebrated novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In each room, works by symbolist and contemporary artists will together weave a strange, mystical, and decadent message. To illustrate, the nineteenth century works of Odilon Redon and Gustave Moreau will interact with countless canvases and sculptures by contemporary artists of both the gallery and from around the world. Furniture, textiles, and other decorative objects will also be included to reinforce the atmosphere of le fin de siècle. And tucked away in the mysterious enclave that is our uncanny poolroom will be the installation of Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir. Combining an array of bizarre elements (video, sound, drawings, hay, burlap sacks…), her work comes to represent not only the starting point for exploring these media, but together a pictorial vocabulary develops that simultaneously disallows any kind of linear storyline. She calls this work ‘COAGULA,’ which is the seventh stage of the fermentation of the soul, or the seventh vertebrae of the snake. The infinite succession of death and rebirth that plagues all of humanity is embodied by the cross-cultural image of the primal snake swallowing his tail, which Friðriksdóttir describes as ‘the eternal cycle of renewal, the creation out of destruction.’ COAGULA then comes to represent an amalgamation of the basis emotions of fear and isolation that constitute the human psyche, as well as the question of the origin and meaning of existence. All is set in the context of Nordic sagas and creational myths in the darkest, placed in the innermost sanctum of the Cueto Project gallery Symbolist exhibition, and in this way symbolic of the Baudelairian spleen itself.” Valérie Cueto Text and translations by Caitlin Boucher
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