Exhibitions
Happy Flowers!
Didier L’Honorey was born in France in 1957. He lives and works between Paris and Normandy. “It is by the merest chance that I discovered the existence of Picasso. I was about ten to eleven years and we just had our first television at home. I came across a program which featured the artist’s work: it was a shock!” At School, he is passionate about the history of painting, he dreams of independence and absolute freedom. At 18, he decided to become a painter. Self-taught, he draws faces and approaches trees and gradually comes to flowers. His first solo exhibition was held in 1989 in Clamart, at Albert Chanot Museum. In 2011, at the Villa Tamaris Art Center in La Seyne-sur-Mer, he presents Floral Variety: Oxygenating Culture, a major retrospective of his flowers paintings. The exhibition catalog is prefaced by Robert Bonaccorsi and art historian Alain Monvoisin.
After a first exhibition in Beirut in March 2012 at the Alice Gallery Mogabgab, Didier L’Honorey returns with Happy Flowers, his second show, and ten recent paintings made between 2013 and 2014. “Basic flowers, those that everyone draws, four round petals and a more or less winding stem on fabrics printed with floral motifs, which are hanging free from the chassis (…),” said Harry Bellet in Le Monde on 16 April 2011.
Free! Didier L’Honorey painting comes to life once it is fixed on the white and cold walls of the gallery. In the wind, it oscillates between joy and sadness, humor and despair, birth and death. It is in the intimacy of his studio that the artist welcomes accidents, watching them and magnifying them to create in a small space and despite the plastic constraints, an obvious surprise! With common fabrics found in popular market, i.e. readymade, he tears the vulgar to its condition and give it an emotional power and a poetic charge. Whether it is acrylic paint or simply cuttings, Didier L’Honorey draws an allegory of our times; it will implement the language of flowers to hire a fierce fight regarding the human chaos, bringing out hope, the source of life.
