I left blue flowers
by the phalloi of Dionysus
thinking of the lions of
apollo
…
Derek Jarman, ‘Pathos – Delos’, a finger in the fishes mouth [1]
The conundrum faced by Jarman in the first paragraph of his poem Pathos – Delos, between the sexual urges of Dionysus, the god of fertility, and the rational thinking of the solar god Apollo, is one that underpins Justin Fitzpatrick’s solo exhibition Angiosperm Telephone at Galerie Sultana, Paris. Jarman’s floral offerings, hesitantly caught between these two deities, find echo both visually and conceptually throughout this new series of works.
Two sculptures are positioned on the gallery floor. As their titles suggest, they represent two bees, with silk pouches around their calves potentially full of pollen, ready to fertilise the floral beds that surround them. Yet their faces are human-like, their heads resembling a nun’s cornette.The bed of pollen is also anthropomorphised, its acne-covered face almost perversely attentive to the elegantly dressed bee mounted upon its body. The flower draws the bee to itself with its smell and the promise of food. In return the bee provides sexual gratification to the flower, allowing it to fruit. This systemic interconnectedness and inter-reliance between species, extendable to humans is facilitated through an olfactory line of communication between plants and insects, an Angiosperm Telephone.
Fitzpatrick draws on the motif of the bee from Denis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue D’Alembert’s Dream, penned in 1769. In contrast to a cartesian dualism of mind and body, Diderot posits consciousness as the collective will of all the cells in a body, as bees in a swarm. In reimagining the soul as an aggregate rather than a divine spirit directing a material form, the traditional boundary between humans and ‘Nature’ is broken down. In Fitzpatrick’s work the bee stands as a reminder of this idea, of the self as a porous network.
As Emanuele Coccia explains in his book The Life of Plants: ‘to inhale is to allow the world to come into us—the world is in us—and to exhale is to project ourselves into the world that we are …The world is not a place; it is a state of immersion of each thing in all other things’. [3] In this exhibition, pollen and perfume are suggested as agents of this interpenetration; the flowers extending their presence into our bodies. Our nervous system and histamine receptors become affected by their pollen; our pleasure and memory centres are stimulated through their perfume.
The painting Laboratory further illustrates this idea by drawing on the decorative tropes of art nouveau, an artistic style that often underpins Fitzpatrick’s painterly work, and which in its time found inspiration within the natural world as a means of remedying the ills of industrial modern life. Here, a human figure is depicted within a lab-like setting. They stand towering over a set of scientific instruments represented as daisies, whose scent lures a swarm of bees to its pistil. The figure appears stunned as the powerful smells intoxicate their body.
As seen in other paintings such as Primavera, these figures are in fact priests. Their likeness is borrowed from The Devils, Ken Russell’s cinematic interpretation of a 1952 non-fiction novel by Aldous Huxley. This historical drama details the rise and fall of Urbain Grandier, a 17th-century Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft following the alleged demonic possessions of a convent of Ursuline nuns. The blooming daisies found in Fitzpatrick’s works which titillate and torment the priests’ senses are contrasted with the sanatorium-white tiled backgrounds that reference the convent’s architecture designed by Derek Jarman for Russell’s film.
Fitzpatrick’s works act themselves as film stills that circulate back to one another as they forewarn on the distortions brought on by a hermetic separation from the outside material world. As Urbain Grandier is burnt at the stake for giving in to his inner desires and the nuns return to their closed repressed monastic life, the world crumbles. The final scene of Russell’s adaptation, designed by Jarman, shows a post-apocalyptic world of destruction, one where D’Alembert’s bees have vanished and lifeless metallic poles have replaced Jarman’s blue flowers. An ominous warning which also closes the latter’s poem that introduced this text: ‘the third knot of the - worry beads fortold an - early winter’ [4]. A winter bereft of life which still however in its soil holds the fruitful seeds of discontented desire.
[1] Derek Jarman, ‘Pathos – Delos’, in a finger in the fishes mouth, (London: Bettiscombe Press, 2014), p. 7
[2] Denis Diderot, Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream, (London: Penguin Classics Series, 1830, 2004)
[3] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018)
[4] Derek Jarman, ‘Pathos – Delos’, in a finger in the fishes mouth, (London: Bettiscombe Press, 2014), p. 7


18 Nov. 2022 – 14 Janv. 2023
Angiosperme Telephone, Justin Fitzpatrick
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Histaminos, Oil on linen, 2022, 90 x 140 cm unframed







Bee and pollen I, 2022
Wood, resin, silk metal wire, beaded car seat covers, fabric tape
165 x 127 x 165 cm

Bee and pollen II, 2022
Wood, resin, silk metal wire, beaded car seat covers, fabric tape
90 x 240 x 70 cm