Anya Gallaccio’s roses

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I
Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio (b. 1964) has worked with flowers for many years now. In doing this, she continually stages a tension between transcendence and ephemerality. Some of Gallaccio’s works prove particularly difficult to appreciate because they require that one spend a long time in front of these installations, still, careful and watchful, second after second. Since her art unfolds in time rather than in space, Gallaccio engages us into arduous contemplation: in their essence, her creations are ephemeral. Gallaccio’s flowers invite us to contemplate the splendor, the exuberance and the intensity of life in all of what it holds that is fleeting and perhaps inapprehensible. The pictures, videos and panels of inert flowers that document these installations only remain as residues of a work of art which literally has a life of its own. This is an excess of life that becomes manifest in an appeal to the senses.

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This excess heightens our sense of smell: in one of her installations Gallaccio created a large horizontal rectangle on the floor, quite similar to a rug, in which she had placed ten thousand roses. It isn’t hard to believe that the gallery room must have exhaled an overwhelming perfume, so excessive that it could even seem unreal, a perfume that impregnates the space like an interrogation.

III
This excess also manifests itself in a visual plenitude, as they fill the field of the gaze. Some have compared Gallaccio’s installations to Mark Rothko’s paintings. Both artists create a chromatic space for contemplation. Rothko would saturate color by superposing layers or paint and creating horizontal stripes whose outlines were blurry, as if these were volatile spaces –aerial spaces?– or as if they were a mental attitude in which the border between consciousness and intuitions were equally blurred. Rothko’s abstractions are undeniably informed by transcendence: when spectators look at them, they also contemplate themselves in a mental attitude that is frequently associated to Zen meditation.
Gallaccio’s installations equally contain a transcendent element, even in such ephemeral pieces. Gallaccio uses roses, with the excessive pigmentation of their petals, to construct a fleeting overwhelming instant: the instant of ecstasy. Anya Gallaccio’s roses are Dionysian roses.