Christian Tagliavini: Flora

With the new series Flora, Christian Tagliavini meditates about the future and inverts the arrow of time, compared to his previous works. Because Flora is about seeds. And seeds are an almost-future: they contain it in potentia.

Tagliavini’s future features a spectrum of golden, luminous shades. This future may be warm or even torrid, who knows. It’s evoked by nine female figures associated with nine sets of botanical items and special examples of coleoptera. The women are managing and gestating these items – they do guard them. We see points, curls, wings, layers, spikes, stems, spirals, spores. And we may guess cinorrhoda, corymbs, cotyledons, plumulas, petals, pollens and pollinators.

It’s an imaginary, visionary nature, diverse and biodiverse, hand-crafted by the artist down to the smallest detail fully using his artisan intelligence, and the art of photography. However, this diversity seems somehow organic and familiar to us. Even those figures, smooth and beautiful, are different from each other. We are contemplating a wonderful genetic treasure before its destiny.

Such a treasure, that all of the subjects have scientific binomials. These names are coined in a reinvented Latin which resonates with some modern idioms, as it contains them as well.

Flora – seeding a future – is a new artist’s visual introspection contrasting his own experiences with the inexorable march of time and pollinating a fertile future.