ROME.- For its second exhibition since the opening of its Roman space, La Società delle Api presents I fiori del male, a project dedicated to the work of Chiara Camoni and curated by Alice Motard. The exhibition takes as its starting point a collection assembled over the years by Silvia Fiorucci, who has followed the artist’s work since her beginnings.

The flower is ubiquitous in Camoni’s work, where it appears both as a motif and as a material. But what happens when we stop seeing it as the consensual symbol of life, delicacy and beauty? I fiori del male reveals another side—chthonic, encrypted, destructive, artificial, spiritual.

The exhibition does not seek to deny the fundamentally positive dimension of Camoni’s work, which is grounded in respect for nature, handmade processes and collective making, but rather to complicate it. It brings to light its darker side, the shadowy zones and spaces beyond the frame. For “beauty is always bizarre”, in the words of Charles Baudelaire, whose 1857 collection of poems lends its title to the exhibition; it is traversed by the sordid, by desire and violence, and by all that is usually repressed, concealed or kept at bay.

The exhibition opens with two pencil drawings of lilies, flowers known for their toxic properties, from a larger series made by the artist during the Covid-19 pandemic. Every day during the first lockdown, Camoni would send an image of one of her sketches to a circle of friends, including Silvia Fiorucci. From one sheet to the next, the flower metamorphoses. Lascivious bodies, sexual organs, animals, faces and other mimetic signs: the vegetal forms become almost hallucinatory, like the figures we see in clouds—a recurring motif in the work of the French poet.

These carnal forms echo the “sickly” flowers of his book, which caused a scandal in its time. Each room explores a different facet of this subversive power: the flower as poison, as language, as jewel, as threat, or as apparition. The poet’s verses punctuate the exhibition, inflecting the way it is read.





Reflecting the artist’s habit of welcoming other voices into her practice, the exhibition brings together works by Fantine Andrès, Maria Loboda, Marianne Marić, Vibeke Mascini, Lionel Sabatté, Adrianna Wallis and Yuyan Wang. Acting as “counterpoints”, they extend and sharpen the reflections initiated by Camoni’s own pieces.

All these works, gathered within the setting of the palazzo at 40 Via Gregoriana, enter into dialogue with the Renaissance grotesques adorning its vaulted compartments, the coffered ceilings of its rooms, the marquetry of its parquet floors, and the marble found throughout the building. Between the vegetal, the animal and the architectural, I fiori del male thus proposes a non-Manichean, troubled and ambiguous reading of Chiara Camoni’s work.

—Alice Motard