Florian Mermin – On n’enterre pas tes ailes sous la pierre, 2024

Florian Mermin’s work is informed by influences from film, literature and philosophy, from Jean Cocteau to Edgar Allan Poe or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It seeks to establish a dialectic between objects and humans, reality and the imagination, the animate and the inanimate, to blur the boundary between inner and outer. His immersive installations engage all of the five senses to explore the artistic and poetic possibilities of living things. His sculptures and ceramics involve natural or artificial plants, fresh or dried flowers, and borrow from the aesthetics of the hybrid, thanks to encounters with fantastic worlds and his quest for “the uncanny”.

Florian Mermin’s sculptures were created for the courtyard of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, and make reference to the history of the Palais Saint-Pierre, which in the 19th century was home to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and its “flower class”, where future designers for the Lyon silk industry were trained. Surrounded by vegetation of the cloisters, the former base of a sculpture by Auguste Rodin has become a funerary monument in memory of the rose growers buried in the old cemetery in Vénissieux, which the artist visited when he was researching the history of roses. The sculpture On n’enterre pas tes ailes sous la pierre (“We won’t bury your wings under the stone”) is inspired both by the ceramic decorations in the Palais Saint- Pierre and by Terra, a terracotta sphere that the artist Claudio Parmiggiani arranged to have buried in the garden. With its mixture of vitality and disappearance, Florian Mermin’s work is a new vanity, evoking the fleeting and transient nature of existence.