Les Fleurs du Mal

Quiet and bucolic reader,
Upright man, sober and naive,
Throw away this book, saturnine,
Orgiac and melancholy.[1]

The three triptychs positioned in the center of the exhibition by Miri Or offer the viewer a sense of surprise: these are flowery and colorful panoramas in shades of blue-turquoise, red-purple, pink, green and gray, embedded in a kind of a black shading. The associations that arise from the first encounter with these large-scale paintings are of flower fields on sky or water backgrounds and alternately, innocent-looking wallpaper. This initial appearance suggests the double-face tactics that characterize Miri Or’s work. After a closer look, these paintings are deciphered in a new light and evoke a sense of discomfort: the floral imagery resembles female genitalia, its description is fleshy and borders on the grotesque, the sweet lively colorfulness suddenly acquires a poisonous nature and the shadings become threatening shadows of crows. These works also suggest connections to different chapters in art history, including Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’, on the one hand, and the erotic symbolism in the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keefe, on the other.
Or’s dialectical process is reinforced with the title ‘Flowers of Evil’ (Les fleurs du mal) that accompanies the exhibition. The phrase is taken from the title of Charles Baudelaire’s famous poem, first published in the first half of the 19th century. In ‘Les fleurs du mal’ Baudelaire expressed not only his feelings toward the decadent materialistic society around him, but also his tormented soul and feeling of duality he experienced in his life. This was described in his autobiographical testimony: “even at childhood I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and ecstasy of life.”[2] Or’s reference to Baudelaire’s poetry should be viewed, then, as a statement that exceeds the immediate imagery appearing in her work.
Over the past two years her paintings depict plants, usually in a most disturbing connotation: the dominant colors are red and black, which evoke a sense of exposed or injured flesh or alternately destruction, annihilation or mourning; its style is expressive and full of substance, distorted and disproportionate. These re presentations are also revealed as tricky and misleading with a dichotomy of the harmonious, beautiful and majestic and of the sordid, twisted and damaged. Or’s ‘Flowers of Evil’ should be recognized as another chapter in her continued painting process – a painting that functions as a speculum of events that are derived from the reality of our lives and at the same time as a representative of an inner, intensive, restless world.
Yaniv Shapira

1 Charles Baudelaire, “Epigraph for a Condemned Book”, The Flowers of Evil, translated by William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954).
2 See: Shimon Zandbeck, “Baudelaire in his double room”, Charles Baudelaire Les fleurs du mal, translation: Dori Manor, Hakibutz Hamehuhad, 1997, p.87.