"The flowers will bloom in the same way" - 23 April - 23 May 2024 - Rosa Mujal - Solo show

Installation - Oil on canvas - terracota - wood

Around  Andorra with 80 flowers

Three years after ‘Du tourbillon de tes cheveux’, Rosa Mujal now returns, to Taranmana and with ‘Les flors floriran de la mesta manera’

Andrés Luengo

She says that her dream is to travel our modest 468 square kilometers and map the flowers that grow there, each with its own scientific sheet, that she will put together with the help of biologist Jordi Nicolau, together with an oil portrait, and that all of it will be collected in a kind of field notebook in the manner of 19th-century explorers. This will have to wait, and who knows when, because she can’t leave everything behind and dedicate a year of her life to wandering around our mountains in search of flowers and florets. But to get a taste of it, she has stuck to Les flors floriran de la mateixa manera, which hangs in the Taranmana gallery in Escaldes until the end of the month.

These are the seven large-format oils that she exhibited in the summer at the last edition of the land art biennial –in the gardens of the old Catsa, you may remember– and that she has now expanded with five more works of a smaller format but in the same spirit.

In short, it is about capturing images in a universe, that of plants, that tend to go unnoticed, that we believe is subordinate to our interests and that we do not hesitate to annihilate without contemplation when it is convenient for a higher purpose. Let's say to erect a building. Nature, says Mujal, always ends up claiming its rights with absolute power and indifference. We will pass, our civilization will pass, humanity will pass and our era will pass, and the flowers will continue to bloom in spring, she insists: "The truth is that nature does not need us for anything, and it is a certainty that, I find especially appropriate in this time of excessive construction. When we disappear, it will once again occupy what is its own."

She is not the first to reflect on this tendency towards entropy that Mother Nature manifests. Think of monographs such as The World Without Us and films such as 12 Monkeys and, more recently, The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Mujal is less dystopian and has focused on our flowers, which were there thousands of years ago and will continue to be here when there is no trace of us. Flowers that are often endemic, which can only be found in certain corners of our parishes, such as the astragalus (Astragalus penduliflorus), of which only one population is known in the Sorteny Valley. Or the maiànthem (Maianthenum bifolium), detected only in Encamp and listed as critically endangered. Or the frare de verneda (Lathraea clandestina), which proliferates in the forests along the banks of the Valira in Sant Julià and which is “in danger”.

At Taranmana she exhibits two series: the one of the biennial, with a flower for each parish, and a second one, with five endemic specimens from the Sorteny natural park.

They have a certain formal relationship with the artist's previous work - think of Du tourbillon de tes cheveux, which she exhibited a few years ago at Mama Maria - and constitute a very personal, delicate and counter-current incursion into a figuration of Pre-Raphaelite origin at the antipodes of what we are used to seeing. And precisely for this reason it is worth coming to Escaldes. To breathe.

https://www.bondia.ad/cultura/la-volta-a-andorra-en-80-flors