Elsa Salonen’s solo exhibition ‚Moonlit Botanical Colour Theories‚, explores flowers and plants from a broad cultural, scientific, and esoteric perspective; it brings together alchemy, Finnish nature worship, still-life paintings, botanical collections, medicinal plants, herbal spells, plant intelligence, and spagyrics. The works reflect on the power of all plants to connect this reality to other metaphysical levels.

Many of the works are guided by a technique Salonen developed a decade ago, in which she distils colours from flowers, leaving them pale and colourless. The artist conserves the extracted colour pigments in laboratory glass vessels, displaying them alongside the white plants. Withering flowers lose their colours in death; as if the life itself were hidden in the colours. In traditional still-life paintings, the painted colours of blossoms captured a moment in time and ‚defeated‘ death. In Still Life with Flowers, Salonen reinterprets this tradition by poetically separating the vivid life energy (the preserved colour) from its empty, pale body (the decoloured flower).

For the past decade, Salonen has painted exclusively with natural pigments, which define the conceptual message of each work. This time, the paintings are made with colours ground from stones and meteorites, extracted from plants, or created by burning bird and reptile parts found in the forests. Medieval alchemists prepared pigments for artists and, through natural materials, sought to understand the universe and humanity’s place within it. The glass vessels in Salonen’s works refer to this tradition and its illustrations.

Thank The Alfred Kordelin Foundation and The Arts Promotion Centre Finland for supporting the exhibition.

Biography
Elsa Salonen (b.1984, Turku, Finland) works in Berlin, Germany (studio location) and the Turku archipelago, Finland. Salonen’s art has been exhibited internationally at institutions including, KINDL Centre For Contemporary Art and Villa Merkel in Germany; Art Sonje Center in South Korea; Kunsthal Aarhus and Kunsthal Viborg in Denmark; Galleri F 15 in Norway and Miguel Urrutia Art Museum in Colombia. Her artworks are included in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (FI), Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art (FI), Saastamoinen Foundation (FI), and Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art (IT). A Permanent Public Artwork by Salonen is situated in the Quiet Room of Meilahti Bridge Hospital, Helsinki (FI).