FLORE is a Franco-Spanish artist whose unique prints possess a timeless, painterly quality. Through refined interventions in the darkroom, working almost like an alchemist, she shapes the world unfolding before her as much as she records it, moving away from conventional photographic representation.
Much of FLORE's work draws on her family history, including her childhood in Egypt and a road trip through Morocco with her mother, a painter. Other series draw on the resonances between her paternal family's history in Indochina and the writings of Marguerite Duras. More recently, her artistic research has increasingly focused on the materiality of the photographic image.
FLORE moves between historical processes such as platinum-palladium printing and cyanotype and more contemporary techniques, at times combining them and working directly into the prints with wax, gold or pigments. Through these processes, she confronts the mystery of passing time: Her work emerges from a tension between the search for landscapes that have disappeared and the attempt to recreate a form of truth in the face of a reality that is gradually fading away. "I try to explore the ability of this medium to create a truth that endures beyond memory."
Imbued with melancholy, her work questions the status of the image in contemporary society and invites the viewer into FLORE's poetic world.
FLORE has received the Prix Nadar and the Prix de Photographie de l'Académie des beaux-arts - Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière. Her work is held in or has been presented by major institutions including the Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris; the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF); the Musée Nicéphore Niépce; the Musée de Picardie; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy; the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire; and the Fryderyk Chopin Museum in Warsaw. It has also been shown at major international art fairs.