Gregory Forstner, Flowers for the Bold (43), 2020

Oil on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

Photo Pierre Schwartz

—

A few months before the first confinement, I made some paintings freely inspired by Velázquez’s dwarfs, whose figures, bulldog heads, held a bouquet of flowers in their hands in an indecisive attitude.

While the title of these paintings, Flowers for the Bold, literally evokes the bouquet visible in my subject’s hands, it also starts from an often-heard reflection about my work that my painting is for the “brave. A reflection that I consider interesting (even if, I confess, it is also a little

irritating) because unconsciously it reveals the naive and carnal relation of the spectator in front of any representation and therefore, in a certain way also, the limits of our aesthetic freedom and of the inevitable social and intimate relation that is expressed in front of the subjects in the painting.

My painting would therefore be for those who admit that a painting feeds on and is part of reality but is not reality. Paintings that only obey the requirement of thought and retina, of sensitivity, and not of a morality imposed by a community whose opinion, necessarily consensual, would reduce both the impact and the scope.

It would be too simplistic to point to confinement and the resulting social, psychological and professional upheavals in an attempt to explain the evolution of a job. It is possible that the situation we live in has favored certain shifts in my work, it is difficult to say… In general, I trust more in intuition and coincidence. What seems undeniable is that deprived to a certain extent of habits and freedoms a priori acquired in our spoiled and rich societies, our equilibrium has been indisputably challenged. In the same way, my usual ring (the exhibitions, the meetings, the work as well as a certain casualness) inside which I usually distribute my “blows” (my painting), disappears for the public and for myself.

Gregory Forstner