El florero en flor

Before the arrival of flowers, the walls of a Dutch house were bare; so too would be, centuries later, the walls of the minimalist house, once the fleeting vegetal exuberance of the modernist home had subsided. But in between, a brutal transformation took place: an overflowing of natural cycles. The surplus, the ancient prize of the earth for those who respected its rhythms, was no longer consumed in wine and festivals; now, for a few, it became collection, ornament. Excess was no longer seen as an immoral challenge to communal life.

On canvas, flowers ceased to be an introspective play of the everyday; they were no longer fragments of nature presented in a closed dialogue, in which the gaze divined a moral or divine trajectory. In these paintings, and on the walls they adorned, all times converged. Flowers did not appear as the unfolding of natural discourse; their rhythm had been altered. It was the manifestation of a new technology, where the seasons had disappeared, as in a dream, and the autumn flower coexisted with that of spring; objects that could only be seen in the distant Orient now appeared alongside those of the Mediterranean. The wall, the place where an entire world gathered; the canvas, a display case. No longer contemplation, but collection. In the new universal feast, one no longer heard the shouting, the fights, or the music of those who have only one day to celebrate; now there were those who could possess the entire universe in the privacy of the domestic.

Between flower and flower, dialogue ceased; color lost ever more ground. What mattered was cataloguing, difference in the archive. Color became a calculation, another label; that is why even the blackness of a tulip could arouse the greatest greed. Each specimen had to be identifiable, quantifiable. From the botanist's drawing—in the pay of the speculator in the new floral market—to the painter's canvas, the distance was no longer so great. The painting no longer held importance as an agape of color, it did not overflow and exceed, but rather synthesized, like the best of accounting methods. Oil was no longer a shared excess. The hours accumulated in the studio were no longer a natural residue to be harvested and sold, but the exhibition of a new universal processing technique, in which the world's prodigies would now remain enclosed within the frame, as in a bank's vaults.

Before the arrival of flowers, in the trivial, in the rhopographic, the still life signaled both the zero degree of the social and the point where the earthly died. The human disappeared before our eyes, and in its place was set the absolute equality of objects, as if eternity awaited behind the silence of things. The vanity of vanities, the illusion, consisted in thinking ourselves above the eternal cycle in which the trivial and the extraordinary perished alike. The flower signaled, in a dazzling last breath of life and meaning, the place of the tomb.

After the first tulip fever ended, when the future of flowers had been sold and uprooted on credit, when only bankruptcies remained for the promise of petals, the illusion would survive in the pictorial presentation of the fiduciary, in which the entire world was registered, accounted for, collected... except the very history of its collection: bloody, unjust, epic, or tragic.

From then on, when the flowers of the canvas spoke of themselves and not of the world and time, or when later they contracted or emptied, even when they recovered color to serve the painting of painting, they would do so in vain. Because they would no longer have any voice but the accounting one, or because in our day their color would be nothing more than another phantom on the stock market screen, concealing the studio and the earth.

In those low lands, in those days, when climate struck as hard as disease or hunger, many adventurers of miniature agriculture "sought in their small gardens and flowerpots the pleasure of strolling through meadows and open fields." A gesture of color could project them into the entire world. Unfortunately, seeking a better life, they bet against the earth. Jorge Diezma returns us to those austere and empty homes, to the moment when the final wager was lost. But not to recall the arrival of the tulip, nor the thousand petals brought by transoceanic companies. Nor does he restore to us the nostalgia for contemplation. On those walls, when time takes its revenge, and only colorless corridors and windows remain; when no trace remains of someone dreaming while awake, someone had to place a flower.

Antonio José Antón Fernández