Adela Picón - FLOWER POWER
To peep through a keyhole is always ambivalent. The observer enters a space that he/she is not allowed and risks to be caught as a voyeur. Adela Picón (born 1958 in Barcelona) takes deliberately advantage of this game of desire, ban and shame in her installation “FLOWER - POWER”. She locks the space up and provokes the viewer to a forbidden act: to peek through the windows. What the observer sees from the outside is of perplexing beauty, exotic, very feminine and therefore capable to captivate the look (male) to seduce.
The three windows of the exhibition-space are uncovering the view onto three projections of slides installed opposite to the viewer. At regular intervals, Life-sized seated women are projected with bright images of flowers caressing the chair and the naked bodies. In the left upper part of the screen the name of the country appears of where the flowers originate: Kenya, Hellas, Bali, Norge, etc. As in the baroque period, under the influence of the book "Iconología" from Cesare Ripas published in 1593, there is a staged scene of countries as female allegories. But a closer look contradicts this reading. The artistic intention of Adela Picón is to break with the preestablished rules.
The way to treat the visuals, shows already the process of dissolution. The slides of flowers that the artist utilizes are from an archive of a botanic scientist. She had photographed and catalogued the typical flora of each country she traveled. These pictures in the installation are depicted out of their context. New meanings in connection of the female body are revealed.
There is a clear reference to Modern Art, like Henri Matisse or Gustav Klimt, which prepared the step to abstraction, in combining feminine and ornament. Also in Adela Picón's work the bodies seem partly dissolved and fragmented. But, at the same time, by their pictorical aspect and their colorfull force, the images evoke preconceived heavenly fantasies about the exoticism and the femininity. Nevertheless, the casual relation between countries and women puts in question such prejudices. Looking through the glass, these "paradises" seem strangely distant and lost.
The reality of the image is highly artificial - and at the same time touching. The models have been integrated by the artist always in the same setting, varying only the projected flowers and country-names as well as their postures. In contrast to this conceptual approach is the intimate character and uniqueness of each photo session, which is more present through the models often shy or clumsy movements. The view through the window becomes always a voluntarily-involuntarily, forbidden incursion into a intimate vague moment.
The installation FLOWER POWER evokes also a reference to the “hippies” movement. It focuses to deal with the other one (the observer) and with non planned relations. Adela Picón is focussed on the interpretation of the baroque, the seduction of the images and involves her audience with an openly but calculated reference of names, images and meanings.
Elisabeth Gerber, September 2003