Exhibitions

Everybody likes flower paintings. At the very least, it’s hard to be offended or repulsed by one. Flower imagery tends to be pretty and dainty–and consequently, uncontroversial, benign, and decorative. Often, deceptively so.

As an artistic motif, flowers reflect a bouquet of meanings, varying depending on the culture and period. Christian iconography associates the white lily with purity, and thus the Virgin Mary and other virgin saints. Vincent van Gogh’s vase of yellow sunflowers was a symbol of cheerful gratitude, painted to welcome a visiting friend. Most other flower paintings in the European tradition deal with the passage of time: some arrangements embody seasons like spring, some defy time by gathering an impossible assortment of flowers that will never bloom in the same season; still, some communicate the transience of life through wilted blooms.

The paintings in Family Floriograph are similarly subtle evocations, for Pabsie Martus’s canvases are coded stories of her domestic life. Beyond the initial shock of pretty, the timbre of individual narratives reveals themselves in colors, compositional gestures, details of decay.

The largest painting is an homage to her mother; peony blossoms, rendered here in pink tints, grow pale as they age, a visualization of maturation. The smaller works represent the temperaments of her siblings; all five feature milflores, whose flowers change color depending on the acidity of the soil in which they root.

In all of these paintings, Martus admits that she is the bee, and its body language–sometimes engaged, sometimes in flight–evokes her feelings towards each family member. The largest painting thus becomes a family portrait, three bees huddled together, sheltering in the embrace of their mother’s petals. The way people speak with flowers has always been intertwined with the zeitgeist. Floriography, or the language of flowers, reached full bloom in the Victorian era, an age where on the one hand, colonial conquest made greenhouses and gardens an imperial status symbol; on the other hand, strict social codes repressed the outright expression of desires, which had to be communicated surreptitiously through flowers. The industrial age brought forth the technology to reproduce images on a massive scale, spanning everything from Francisco Manuel Blanco’s Flora de Filipinas to Andy Warhol’s found photography series Flowers. In Angono, one evening a father returned home with a bucket of honeycomb for his daughter. In 2018, as a fledgling artist, she began her first big foray into mixed media with an oil painting of a rumpled bed in the darkness, framed by the charred remains of a resin hive. Two years later, a pandemic enveloped the world, and amid the isolation, the same young woman found solace in her mother’s garden. All these were necessary historical developments that would eventually birth her first solo exhibition, as well as this very text you are reading. A movement as tiny as the trill of a bee’s wings can cause a massive change elsewhere in space and time; there is a reason why even chaos theory chooses to speak the language of flowers by calling this the butterfly effect.

Perhaps that is the allure of paintings like these. Whether they yield the nectar of hidden stories, or leave us enthralled by their surface, flowers are compelling in their simplicity and complexity.

“Family Floriograph” by Pabsie Martus will be on view at Galerie Joaquin BGC from November 15 – 26, 2023 with the Artist Reception on November 18, Saturday at 5 p.m. Galerie Joaquin BGC is located on the Upper Ground Floor, One Bonifacio High Street Mall, 5th Ave. Corner 28th Street, Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. For inquiries, contact +63 915 739 1549 or email galeriejoaquinbgc@gmail.com.