Les Fleurs du Mal

Les Fleurs du Mal explores the uneasy proximity of beauty and decay. Sunflowers, traditionally associated with light and vitality, appear here as strange celestial bodies, their seed heads forming dark halos against an almost nocturnal ground. Green, veil-like forms rise around them, suggesting both organic growth and something more ambiguous – breath, vapour or poison.

The work takes its title from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, where attraction and corruption, sensuality and mortality are held in constant tension. Rather than illustrating Baudelaire directly, the painting translates this duality into a suspended, dreamlike botanical space.

Through heightened contrast, glowing colour and deliberately stylised forms, the familiar becomes uncanny. The flowers seem simultaneously radiant and exhausted, seductive and threatening. What emerges is a silent landscape in which grace and darkness do not cancel one another out, but become mutually dependent.

Les Fleurs du Mal, 2023
Painting, 100 × 100 cm
Wooden shadow-gap frame