Arnaud Lajeunie - Flowers

EDITIONS ANTOINE ROUX is proud to present its first publication, FLOWERS, by ARNAUD LAJEUNIE.

A more than 6 year-long research endeavour, FLOWERS is Arnaud’s parallel practice focusing on still life photography of handmade arrangements —a sensible counterweight to his established commercial work.

The book gathers a tight selection, taken from hundreds of images, divided in two series, one in colour and the other in black & white. The latter, screenprinted on transparent PVC sheets, creates a third story with unexpected layering of shapes and colours.

These images are as much still life photographs as they are living sculptures and rough sketches, forming a fragile yet precise balancing exercise.

FLOWERS doesn’t represent flowers.
They are explicitly flowers, as per the title, but flowers reduced to mere forms, on which spray paint and kid’s glue will be dumped. They stand reconfigured, their stems artificially grafted together via Serflex, blu-tack or wires.
These mostly supermarket flowers end up being transformed into a pile of stuff to disarm the immediate perception of their very nature.
Forms are made difficult.
It is a stratagem to create a thin breach, through which arises an incertitude, unrelated to any ‘what’ of any object.
It talks to the deeply rooted unconscious feeling of impatience and hesitation.
It is a loose approach on a constantly evolving, reconfigured, half intentionally and half accidentally produced image, where instability is designed from the start, as all these forms are improvised, transient, and modifiable.
The structures always collapse and the novel imposed composition is taken as a new starting point. There is no program, no origin, no end: only a continual uncertainty, an accepted precariousness which imposes permanent reconfigurations until boredom surfaces, then: stop and edit. The edited images are never the actualization of pre-existing mental images. They are the result of constant negotiations.
Ultimately, FLOWERS doesn’t represent flowers. 

– Arnaud Lajeunie

First edition of 300 copies
Printed & bound by Die Keure in Belgium
Hardcover with UV-printed PVC jacket
64 pages (incl. 28 offset colour plates) offset printed on paper + 7 monochrome plates screen printed on PVC
30 × 23,5 cm

© Éditions Antoine Roux