​

 

Vegetal Obscenity II

​

Vegetal Obscenity II stands in cinnabar.
Not as colour, but as transformation.

Cinnabar occupies an unstable territory:
mineral and fire, poison and medicine, matter and transmutation.
In alchemical traditions, it belongs to the possibility that matter might pass from one state into another.
Here, colour is not applied to the sculpture.
It acts upon it.

Its orange-red intensity also carries another memory:
that of spiritual withdrawal, of the saffron and ochre robes associated with Buddhist renunciation.
A colour that does not signify transcendence as escape,
but as a transformation enacted through the body.

The sculpture exists within this contradiction.

The sacred does not oppose matter.
It passes through it.

Wood, horn, urushi, cinnabar, silk, gofun, pearls and peridot accumulate without becoming decorative.
They gather according to a logic of growth, attachment and transformation.
Mineral, animal and vegetal matter cease to occupy separate territories.

Nothing is pacified.

Cinnabar moves across the structure as an active substance.
At once radiant and dangerous,
it brings the surface close to combustion.

Black interrupts it.

The black does not extinguish the cinnabar.
It gives it depth,
introducing within its incandescence a memory of darkness.

 

From this tension, white flowers emerge.

Their appearance marks neither decoration nor botanical representation.
They occur as the visible threshold of a transformation already taking place within the sculpture.

White is not innocence here.
It is opening.

The flower appears at the point where accumulated matter reaches another state:
where density becomes expansion,
where what has remained bound begins to unfold.

Its blooming carries the idea of awakening, not as revelation descending from elsewhere,
but as something produced from within matter itself.

The sacred does not arrive from outside the body.
It flowers through it.

Gofun gives the petals a pale, almost immaterial presence,
while their physical substance remains dense and tangible.
They occupy this contradiction:
between matter and emergence, weight and opening, embodiment and transformation.

 

At their centres, pearls, peridot, silk, lacquer and urushi gather into dense organs.
The precious is not decorative.
It is concentrated matter, held at the very heart of the flowering.

The flowering does not dissolve tension.
It gathers it.

Silk binds.
Urushi seals.
Threads extend from one element to another,
forming a network of attachment that is simultaneously structural and organic.

What opens remains bound.
What flowers remains held.

The lacquered hearts do not function as symbols.
They are centres of concentration:
dark nuclei around which other substances gather, adhere and proliferate.

Beauty, here, is not given as harmony.
It emerges from tension, accumulation and resistance.

The flower is not an image of nature.

It is an event in matter.

It appears where mineral, vegetal and animal substances cease to occupy separate territories,
where distinctions begin to dissolve,
where the inert seems capable of growth.

Vegetal Obscenity II approaches the feminine not as representation,
but as a force of generation and transformation.

A force that binds, secretes, mineralizes, proliferates.

​

The spiritual and the carnal are not opposed.
Nor are the precious and the toxic.

Cinnabar holds them together.

Its beauty contains danger.
Its radiance contains darkness.
Its materiality carries the possibility of transmutation.

What is at stake is not ornament, eroticism or spectacle.

It is matter entering another state.

Not by escaping the body,
but through it.

Matter becomes the threshold of awakening.

​​

​

​_

​

​

​

Each material possesses an internal logic, a velocity, a will.
It imposes its limits, its rhythm, its risks.
The artist invents nothing: she negotiates.

​​

Wood — the memory of the living
Wood preserves a time that is not ours:
a time of slow growth, orientation toward light, resistance to wind.
When I carve it, I do not “transform” it:
I reveal what the material refused to say.
It is a dialogue with organic memory.​

​

Urushi — the breathing material
Urushi is the only material I know
that demands an almost ritual relationship.
It does not dry: it matures.
It requires a precise atmosphere, a level of humidity, absolute patience.
It imposes a temporality incompatible with contemporary production.
It forces me to slow down, to enter into alliance with it.
It is a material that cannot be coerced.
It transforms the artist as much as the work.

​​​​

Horn — undomesticated animality
Horn is the opposite of wood:
rather than yielding to carving, it resists.
It retains the memory of a mobile, fighting, living body.
To work horn is to enter into dialogue with a pre-cultural energy.
It introduces into the work a principle of aggression,
a refusal of ornamentation.

​

​

-

​

*The works in the Vegetal Obscenity series unfold over an extended period of time, sometimes spanning several seasons. They are not executed, but cultivated.
The material is repeatedly revisited, slowed down, left to rest, then reactivated, following a rhythm akin to vegetal growth itself.

This process, which can extend from several months to a year, allows the image to transform, deepen, and resist immediacy. Each work thus carries the trace of lived time — a silent maturation in which gesture and waiting remain in dialogue.