David O'Halloran
Essay for the group exhibition 'There are tears in the heart of things'
June 2016 - Walker Street Gallery

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Fabrice Bigot’s new series continues from where his acclaimed Naked Garden series left off. When the Naked Garden series was shown at Walker Street Gallery in 2015, I described the black hue as ‘this boundless black [that] locates the imagery between abstraction and representation’. Bigot has shrouded his floral subjects in a thick veil of black in both of these series, yet the darkness threatens something else. This is a different black; it represents not the dissolution of real into an attractive abstraction, but rather acts as a ghostly slow decay.

Colour is prominent, yet these images should not be misinterpreted as more hopeful than the colourlessNaked Garden. The fragile hope suggested by the glitter of colour is short lived; the rose and the chrysthanthemum will die, even with nurture and love.

These images are artificially lit in the studio space: without its natural support system the beauty of the flower will be fleeting, yet the camera casts it to cold perpetuity.

The tenebrous veil of black has become a zephyr closing in and overwhelming beauty and life.