On the occasion of the launch of its autumn programme, Capsule Venice is delighted to present Vista, Mevlana Lipp’s special project in Project Room 1. Inspired by Lipp’s recent visit to Venice, this solo presentation offers a glimpse of the artist’s long-standing interest in the hybridisation of the natural and the artificial, the human and the floral realms. Vista expresses Lipp’s most recent achievements in colour and composition.
Mevlana Lipp (b. 1989 Cologne, Germany where he currently lives and works) spent his childhood in a small town in the forest of Germany. Since that time, nature has represented not merely a conceptual motif for Lipp, nor a detached and far-away ‘outside’ to be invented. Nature has been an active extension of Lipp’s existence, a heartfelt, spontaneous ‘inside’, a given, responding foremost to personal imperatives rather than aesthetic ones. It was only after entering the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, where he graduated in 2015, that the artist began to depict nature - especially plants - as a topic, and these subjects became a key element of his sculptural, painterly, and animation practice.
Since ancient times, philosophers and scholars have wondered about plants. Metonymic of nature itself, plants have been considered the privileged object for understanding life. However, in attributing a fundamental role to plants, the vital components of plant bodies have often been removed, mostly reduced to the basic aspects of life itself, and this has relegated the plant world to a position on the border between the living and the non-living, a position of privilege, it must be said, but above all a liminal condition according to a panoply of interpreters.
In Aristotle - whose interpretation of the world of plants would rule Western thought for centuries - plants occupy a step above inert bodies, minerals and metals in his scale of beings, but they are below other living things, almost separate from them. Especially within the Aristotelian tradition, this scalarity translated into the subtraction of vital activities, including movement, sensorial experience, and the consciousness of feeling; effectively reducing plants to a condition of minority in comparison with animals. For a very long time, it was thought that plants ‘just live’: they feed, grow, and generate their own kind.
Even though Lipp is aware of the complex anatomical organisation, and of the well-developed sensory system of plants - realms that today occupy a special place in the most innovative and future-facing botanical, philosophical, engineering circles - he doesn’t directly investigate discourses regarding the potential of plants from this standpoint. He employs a personal and intimate approach towards them. The intrinsic, apparent quality of plants to exist in a more ‘basic’ way was what attracted him at first to their world. According to the artist:
Plants don’t speak with each other; they just touch and feel. They are there per se, so their life and psychology are not as ‘complicated’ as those of humans. When you walk into the forest, you take a look at all the existing connections, at how things interact with each other without fear. Plants don’t run the risk of hurting each other’s feelings. Everything seems to have its own place. It all goes back to a very basic instinct.
It was the artist’s longing for this kind of distillation to the essence that allowed plants to gradually, yet firmly, find their way into his work in both material and metaphorical form.
In Lipp's oeuvre, plants and flowers, though inspired by real examples, exist as fictions. They are not intended to be portrayed in accurate and scientific ways. Even though initially the plants portrayed by Lipp had a direct link to his immediate surroundings, or to plants he used to grow himself, they became more abstract elements, based on reconfigurations of leaves and roots that, although they begin as sketches, soon transmute into new entities at the boundaries between figuration and abstraction.
Flowers and plants are imbued with sinister and surreal tones, acting as signifiers that stand in for humanity, and for a wide range of human emotions spanning from fear to sensuality, from empathy to impishness. But, differently from humans, whose behaviours are processed by sociality and culture and, therefore, are often influenced by inhibitions, in Lipp’s works plants explore each other, touch each other, communicate with each other based on instinctual interactions, in a ‘thoughtless’ way, a spontaneous and unrestrained way.
Lipp’s most recent body of work exhibited in Venice introduces formal and conceptual breakthroughs in the artist’s progress. Lipp’s colour palette has become warmer; instead of fluorescent hues of blue and green, the artist has enriched compositions with red, orange, and purple tones, signaling a modal shift; still fluorescent but subtler. Images of bars, evoking the patterns of metal window bars that the artist has seen while walking around Venice intersect with the flowers and plants is new as well. With their geometric, yet sensuous, lines they stand in sharp contrast to Lipp’s floral patterns, while, at the same time, complimenting them. The bars act as ‘windows within windows’, visual hints of the vistas the artist refers to in the title of his project. But perhaps what strikes the viewer most is that, for the first time in Lipp’s work, bars stress the presence of an outside and of an inside, of a formal, but most of all conceptual, separation between the target of an idealised longing and the real conditions of living in the collective world, in a society where humans don’t follow the same patterns as plants, and experience feelings of not belonging and distress; feelings that nevertheless plants can help to mitigate.
Plants are, for Lipp, both an example of endless mystery and of resilience. They are a cure for the artist’s own melancholia, a safe haven where one may abandon or reconcile with one’s own inner self. Plants also provide a new way of understanding the world and ourselves; that even though not reliant on human language or grammar they are able to speak and inspire new ways for humans to be human.
Text: Manuela Lietti
