I know it Nature was a writer, the poppies of Michal Rovner they would be his poetry. In all the improbably beautiful works of his serie Pragimhe left us a requiem for Nature. Just as the howling of his dogs echoed throughout his house that terrible October morning, Rovner’s poppies show us how great Nature’s lament is. They show a fleeting and shy elegance, they bloom only once.
In early October, desert poppies of Pragim in Rovner they were in full bloom, their crimson petals bearing witness to the atrocious violence of that day. From his forays into the surrounding desert, passing wild poppies, Rovner regularly took his dogs to the protected shelter in his home. Out there, in the silence of Nature, he waited patiently with a dark-vision camera, observing the nocturnal movements.
In the heart of darkness, he discovered how much mystery and magnificence are embodied in these beautiful, pure and faithful natural creatures. At dawn on the seventh day of that fateful month of October, the dogs woke her with deep anguished yelps. With their sixth sense and their innate ability to understand Nature, in the harrowing minutes before the alarm sirens began to blare it almost seemed as if they were anticipating the frightening tragedy.
At a confidential presentation of his monographic exhibition Pragim – open until April 18th Pace Gallery Of New York City – Rovner described the confluence, that morning, of sounds and atmospheric phenomena, barking dogs, sirens and screams. Poppies, with their disturbing vermilion elegance, have been the subject of his study since 2019. In the repercussions of the October trauma, Rovner has found a powerful symbolic use for his poppies, which today serve as a sort of requiem for the natural world.
The serie Pragim in Rovner it must be placed within a longer visual and literary tradition whereby symbolic associations have been established between poppies, tragedy, loss and trauma. Poetry In Flanders Fields about the Great War John McCrae forever imprinted violence and memory in the shape of the fine vermilion red flower. Since then, the millions of young soldiers killed on the plains of Belgium and France during the First World War have been associated with poppies, flowers that we ordinarily come across in the fields of Europe that were the scene of battles. Even today, in the nations of the British Commonwealth every year many people pin memory poppies on the lapels of their jackets to remember those who died in war. Visually, however, not all poppies speak to the trauma of armed conflict.
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Charles Demuth, Red Poppies1929
The American painter Charles Demuth, for example, he painted them in reference to the cycle of human life, he exploited their delicate shape to communicate transience and loss. In the New York in the early 1920s, the gay painter Demuth painted luminous watercolors of botanical subjects, evoking the brilliance of the natural world and hinting, perhaps, at that of the queer circles he frequented in Manhattan. Late in life, Demuth was diagnosed with diabetes. Weakened and greatly hindered in his movements in the last years of his life, he chose the image of the poppy, painting in the same composition the bud, the opening of the petals, the full bloom and the wilting.
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Also Andy Warhol he revived the image of the poppy along the lines of mass media and consumer phenomena. Starting from a 1964 photograph by Patricia Caulfield, published in Modern Photography Magazine and depicting hibiscus flowers, Warhol created a series of works reinventing the original. In a silkscreen from 1965, the artist transformed hibiscus flowers into poppies, painting them in a vermilion red shade. In Warhol’s works, the elegance and timeless charm of the poppy were accentuated.
Pushing into the majestic depths of the natural world, Rovner use sight to locate community in all its forms. He understands its summits and structures and the way to choreograph its presentation to the world. His images evoke a more intense creative sensitivity towards humanity and society. Rovner sees the world – both natural and human – in all its unadorned reality, laid bare before her eyes, often in the clarity of its black and white or the immediacy of its vermilion red. Indeed, in the kinetic digital works of the series Pragim, i Rovner poppies they are presented in a palette of blacks and reds. A gentle imperceptible breeze moves the petals and stems, alluding to a natural dance in slow motion. Its flowers, starkly displayed in black, white and red, move in poetic dialogue with Nature.
«Nature always knows more than everyone», Michal once told me. I replied that, certainly, it is a good reason to listen to her. Not everyone, however, is given such a capacity for deep listening. Only people endowed with a sensitivity of this type can understand the wisdom of Nature, to embrace the essence of the flora and fauna that surround us. Rovner has excellent abilities to perceive Nature, shaped little by little by his artistic mind and his expressive language.
Every now and then, in his works inspired by Nature indirect references to geopolitics appear, for example in his press Roadmap of 2024 in which a field of black and white poppies is digitally processed and distorted and stretched horizontally, so as to resemble a twisted tangle of streets and alleys that overlap, collide, flow into each other. In this work, there is a clear reference to the political failures of the alleged “Roadmap for Peace” in the region during the early 2000s. Rovner seems to argue that Nature, like the body, never loses track.
In his observation works of Nature, another element appears and intertwines that Rovner borrows from herself. It is a primordial purity, something inviolate and intact. Poppies at the center of the series Pragim they represent the purity of Nature and at the same time also a requiem for such a ferocious violation.
At the heart of the vision of Rovner’s world there is human resilience, the resilience of Nature and humanity on a large scale. It is not surprising that fragility and determination are the central themes of these prints. The contrast between these values generates a bubbling lava, the heat of which is lethal. Such a fiery confrontation leaves the flower’s silhouette upright and skeletal, proud and resilient, but fundamentally crippled.
Translation by Anna Bissanti
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– 2024-03-17 07:10:21
