Selfie Flowers II

From October 8 to November 30, 2019
Alice Mogabgab – Beirut presents the exhibition
Didier L’Honorey
Selfie Flowers II
Paintings & papers

French version (PDF) English version (PDF)

Selfie Flowers. Using brown ink Didier L’Honorey portrays a basic flower: four petals, a stem and a pot. The image fills the white paper in a frontal arrangement, always reproduced in the same rectangular vertical format of 65 x 50 cm.
Drawn, coloured in or sprayed in generous calligraphic movements, L’Honorey’s flowers do not refer to anything real; they do not represent any specific floral variety. They are born out of the artist’s imagination and his graphic exercises; each new flower emanates from the previous one. With his one hundred and fifty drawings Didier L’Honorey defies the rules of creation, as he repeatedly develops a single motif on one support, in one medium, thereby achieving the obviously simple. Varying his flower in a myriad of different attitudes: feminine, victorious, rebellious, voluptuous or radiant, invasive, cheeky or seductive, authoritarian, minimalist or abstract, menacing, nervous, humble or coquette, timid, discrete, or complex, bending over, curled up, square, round, fragile, poetic, depressive or funny … Didier L’Honorey conveys – subtly and casually – the act of painting with feeling.
In the end, the whole forms an astonishing gallery of one hundred and fifty selfies, in which each flower appears alone, autonomous, singular, different. In the early stages of his career, L’Honorey painted faces using the icon method, faces with no reference to anyone specific and yet very different from one another.

Didier L’Honorey was born in France in 1957. He lives and works in Paris and Normandy. As a schoolboy L’Honorey had a passion for art history and dreamed about a free and independent life. At the age of 18 he decided to become a painter. Being autodidact he has drawn faces and trees, gradually moving towards painting flowers. His first solo exhibition took place in 1989 in Clamart, at the Musée Albert Chanot. In 2011, at the Villa Tamaris Arts Centre in La Seyne-sur-Mer, he presented Variété florale: oxygénante culture, a major retrospective of his flower paintings. Robert Bonaccorsi and the art historian Alain Monvoisin wrote the preface to the exhibition catalogue.
L’Honorey’s first solo show in Beirut took place in 2012 at the Galerie Alice Mogabgab and was followed in 2015 by a second show of paintings and collage works. In 2018 and 2019, Didier L’Honorey returns with a two-part-exhibition of a never shown series of one hundred and fifty drawings, Selfie Flowers, produced in 2010 with walnut stain and China ink, representing a basic flower, a simple flower in a pot which the artist seeks to tame.

Books