PALMEHUSET

“Palmehuset” means Palm House in Danish. This work, which started in Norway in the botanic garden of Bergen is a tour between hot and cold, wild and structured, between liberty and the strictest order. But they are also images showing the power of adaptation, coexistence and survival. In my work, which shows a series of places, life experiences or intentions, schemes of what you look at. Palmehuset are Palm Houses in European cities, above all in Northern Europe like Norway, Denmark, Germany and Austria. These greenhouses, located inside botanical gardens, often forgotten, revive old times when species of far away places were kept like large living treasures. Every important family during the 18th and 19th century possessed its own “Garden of Delights”, as an exotic luxury. Following the line of my work about the world of luxury with its relation to a decadent past, the botanic garden remains like an island within the modern cities with their frenetic life, exploitation and selfishness.

In the Palm Houses there is also selfishness, selfishness for the space, the colours, the texture of their leaves, the light. In these places light is what gives life – just as on the photo – to each of the species pushing upward, maybe to flee and go back to where they were brought from. The leaves expand and the flowers flourish in a brutal, almost aggressive manner within these glass cages which structure, arrange and file them. In reality it is this struggle between the search for freedom, between the wild, between the chaos which we belong to against the order, the iron structure which doesn’t let us escape from the established rules. Beyond these rules there is again chaos and frenetic life. And this way the struggle smoothly turns into coexistence, where the tubes turn into roots and the water lily leaves into fountains. The colours melt into green and light brown and the oxides of the metals is surrounded by green. The iron structure containing this life orgy is slowly becoming organic but only towards its interiors, only its bowels breathe the oxygen of the plants, towards outside it remains steady, cold but gorgeous.

Maybe this controversy doesn’t get us anywhere, just like the paths which lead to nowhere. Is it struggle for the sake of struggle? The straight line can lead us to the infinite space but the curve can abandon us between flower pots and stale water.

My look in Palmehuset intends to express that if there is a struggle, it is for something that we cannot renounce, the survival of our beliefs, the liberty we are destined for, liberty we sometimes suffer for but which we cannot run away from. Some species with more force, others from the soil or the floor tiles, but all of them grow, develop and create pompous forms full of lust like Bosch showed in his painting “Garden of Earthly Delights”.