"The shape of a city changes faster, alas, than a mortal's heart." - Charles Baudelaire, "Le Cygne," Les Fleurs du mal
Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present The Flowers of the Screen, an online exhibition of new digital paintings by RJ, staged entirely within the stories of a spefically created Instagram account, reanimating the character and philosophy of Charles Baudelaire. For seven days, collectors will be granted access to daily story previews, where the works will surface among photographs of Paris and fragments of text, and disappear after 24 hours.
At the heart of the exhibition is the figure of the digital flâneur, a reimagining of Baudelaire's original flâneur, who wandered the arcades and boulevards of nineteenth century Paris, observing the crowd while remaining apart from it. Here, RJ's Baudelaire account moves through the same city, offering paintings and texts derived from the modern crowd of both the metropolis and the internet. Paintings of contemporary cityscapes featuring the cobbles of Montmartre, the crowds of Marais and the traffic of Avenue Montaigne will be presented alongside prose-poems composed from restaurant reviews, comment threads, network announcements, and private confessions. Through the blending of these words, the project presents a Paris no longer only walked but scrolled, lived simultaneously on the street and in the feed.
The title turns Les Fleurs du mal toward this device, and in the profile picture of the account - the site of the show itself - Baudelaire himself appears, holding a smartphone. For Baudelaire, modernity was "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent." The exhibition takes this definition as its format. The story, a medium designed to vanish, becomes the site of the private view: each work is encountered briefly, in passing, on the same screen that holds everything else, and is then withdrawn. In a digital life defined by endless circulation and instant disappearance, The Flowers of the Screen proposes looking as a fleeting privilege, and collecting as the decision to hold on to what was only meant to pass.
Online, Instagram @cb16848519