Unglee

Unglee became known in the late seventies for his experimental films and in the eighties for his photographs of Tulips. Alongside his exhibitions, he has appeared in art magazines such as Art Press, Art Présence and Technikart, in which he has published his Disparitions, fictitious obituaries of daily newspapers in which his life and his lifelong passion for tulips are told. These works, which are at the confluence of language and visual arts, exude an ironic spirit and a grating elegance, even though they put in abyme his ever-repeated disappearance.

“In 1991 my work with tulips became more abstract. It was very interesting because I was able to make a piece with almost nothing, a flower, three pieces of stems, and it became some kind of ideograms, hieroglyphics or secret alphabet, something that didn’t look like anything and that I called “Eludiennes”, a word that doesn’t mean anything.

I don’t remember exactly how I came up with this name, how I made it. I forgot to write it down, or rather I only wrote it down partially. I seem to remember that it was composed from the adjective “playful” because the placement of the flower and the stems were like a game to me and the verb “to elude” because the meaning of these forms eludes our understanding.”