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“Palmehuset” means Palm House in Danish. This work, which began in Norway, in the Bergen botanical garden, is a journey between the warm and the icy, between the wild and the structured, between freedom and the most meticulous order. But they are also images that show the power of adaptation, coexistence and survival. In my work, in which I show a series of places, experiences or intentions, the schemes of what the gaze is deposited on are repeated. Palmehuset, are Palm Houses in European cities, mainly in Northern Europe such as Norway, Denmark, Austria. These greenhouses located inside botanical gardens, usually forgotten, evoke times past when species from other worlds far away were preserved, like great living jewels. Every great family between the 18th and 19th centuries had their "Garden of Earthly Delights" as an exotic luxury. Following the line of my work on the world of luxury, which encompasses so much, with its connotations of the decadent past, the botanical garden remains like an island within modern cities with its frenetic pace, its exploitative fumes and its egoisms.

 

In the houses of Palmeras there is also selfishness, selfishness for the space, for the colors, for the textures of its leaves, for the light. The light is, in these plots, what gives life - just like in the photograph - to each of the species that push themselves wide and upward, perhaps to flee and return to their forests of origin. The leaves expand and the flowers open in a brutal, almost aggressive way, within these glass cages that structure, order and archive them. In reality, it is that fight between that search for freedom, between the wild, between the chaotic to which we belong against what is ordered, the iron structure that does not let us leave the established, a limit already drawn, outside of which it exists. again the chaos, the frenetic rhythm and the smoke. And so the fight peacefully transforms into a coexistence, where the pipes become roots and the water lily leaves into fountains. The colors all blend into greens and earths, and the oxide of the metals is wrapped in verdigris. The iron structure, which contains this orgy of lives, gradually becomes organic but only towards its interior, only its guts breathe the oxygen of the plants, towards the outside it remains immobile, strong, cold but magnanimous.

 

Perhaps this controversy does not lead us anywhere, like the corridors that appear repeated to nowhere. Is it the fight for the fight? The straight line can take us to infinity, but the curve can lose us among planters and stagnant water.

 

My look at Palmehuset tries to show that if there is a fight, it is for something that cannot be renounced, for the survival of our beliefs, for the freedom to which we are destined, for which we sometimes suffer but from which we cannot escape either. . Some species with more force, others from earthen or tiled floors, but all grow, develop and create pompous forms full of lust as Bosco showed in his "Garden of Earthly Delights".