LEAVES OF GRASS

This spring, baudoin lebon is pleased to invite the young Belgian photographer Mathilde Nardone to show her work alongside that of peers having preceded her on the theme of herbarium.

Born in 1994 in Brussels where she lives and works, Mathilde Nardone diverts both the genre of still life and the photographic medium as she uses a scanner to compose her floral works, whose beauty is as delicate as clinical. Her compositions sometimes convoke dozens of vegetal items, thrown with generosity onto the device?s glass, or at other times strike by their sobriety and minimalism. The artist therefore seems to go back to the true essence of what the still life genre is, in its first acceptation which appeared in the Netherlands in 1650: still-leven (still nature).

Certainly, several stories have since been written concurrently: that of botanists and scientists who, thanks to the foundation of natural history cabinets, have done their best to represent the diversity of our flora; and that of artists, who have drawn in this subject an endless source of inspiration. From the rejoicing witticisms of Joël Ducorroy to the formal perfection of Robert Mapplethorpe?s bouquets, passing by Charles Aubry?s albumin prints or the art nouveau sketches of Emile Gallé, the ?Leaves of Grass? exhibition conveys the visitor to a bucolic travel through time.

Mathilde Nardone meets : Charles Aubry, Joël Ducorroy, Henri Foucault, Emile Gallé, Mi-Hyun Kim & Robert Mapplethorpe.