Beautiful Decay
2024. Solomon Arts Gallery, Dublin. Painting.
Beautiful Decay was Melissa's inaugural solo exhibition with Solomon Fine Art on Balfe Street, Dublin. A new body of oil paintings, the work draws on the long tradition of botanical art and pushes it somewhere more contemporary, alive to growth, colour and impermanence.
Musa McKim Guston
At first glance, I saw Keats, or rather I felt the atmosphere of a Keats poem. Through this encounter with flowers, a mixture of bloom and decay, I was taken back to an ode, with thepathos of broken hearts. I recalled ‘branched thoughts’* and ‘droop-headed flowers’** I saw colourful birds in Victorian cages. Inspired by Edouard Heckel's botanical illustrations, Orchidae features on the cover of the Summer 2022 issue of The Stinging Fly magazine.
* Ode To Psyche by John Keats (1819)
** Ode on Melancholy by John Keats (1820)
In Beautiful Decay we encounter art history, botany, the seasons, the cycle of life (and death), and a spectrum of feelings. Through the melancholy of Keatsian romanticism and the tenderness of maternal love, these paintings confront us with much that is familiar and often uncomfortable. Light and shadow move through floral arrangements in various states of decay while the materiality of paint, of surface, texture and technique disrupts and at times, energises.
Viewers are invited to step into the richness of a painterly world: a world of sensation that resonates on evocative, emotional and visceral levels.
The studies in this series include elaborate and decadent floral arrangements, often in states of deterioration, and dark still lifes from an outdoor garden; wilder and neglected but with tenacious roses amongst the weeds.
In Through sunset and slow dusk we experience delicate, poignant pinks, the crepuscular light of perfect summer evenings – gardens full and verdant; a tribute to the artist's mother, who loved flowers.
In Rosaito Festival and a hundred roses might bloom, we glimpse older worlds. Layers of light in the backgrounds draw the gaze to the otherworldly. Echoing the work of Gustave Moreau, light here creates a sense of enchantment with a nod to the ecstasy of his religious paintings. We can almost sense sound in these worlds, just-grasped invisible notes, music lifting and falling like internal compositions.
