MONA OREN, Wax Poetry
Sculptor, wax artist, performer, painter—the words are insufficient to describe the practice of this artist, winner of the Liliane Bettencourt Prize pour l’Intelligence de la Main® in 2018 and recent resident of Villa Kujoyama.
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“Fair one, let’s see if the rose…”, this rose of Ronsard reminds us all of our mortality, a memento mori that reminds us that time passes. The flower is also the ephemeral that urges us to seize the day, and this, Mona Oren has understood and contemplated. Through archaeological discoveries, we know that wax survives and persists over time. It is this great resilience that guided Mona towards working with wax during her studies at the Beaux-Arts in Paris in the early 2000s.
Photo © Ivana Kalvacheva
From one flower to another, Mona Oren, with an almost demiurgic gesture, offers eternal life.
Whether it be irises, tulips, or pansies, they number in the thousands. Transformed, heightened, attenuated, the veracity of the model interests the artist little, for whom the inspiration of shapes and colors is spontaneous. From her wax, Mona sculpts and gives life to a field of eternal flowers whose apparent fragility and ephemerality contrast with their true durability and resistance.
Photo © Ivana Kalvacheva
From her lifelong idol, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mona Oren reflects on the corporeality and floral sensuality that wax perfectly captures, thanks to its ability to preserve the imprint in transparency and delicacy, but also its proximity to the skin.
“I found in flowers a possibility of transfiguration between the flower and the human.”
Anthropomorphic, these flowers represent us, each with its colors, its flaws, its scars…
These anthropomorphic still lifes aim to be “surprising” for the artist who wishes to “create still lifes that astonish.”
Photo © Ivana Kalvacheva
For Mona Oren, it is a long reflection on nature and especially on flowers that “have always been there” and coexist with an entire ecosystem. The environment and nature are an important part of the artist’s work, who has also realized several performances in situ between 2002 and 2021. Called the Dead Sea Project, this series of performances led by Mona Oren around the Dead Sea in Israel combines her wax work and her desire for nature. In Dead Sea (2002), the artist floats wax flowers in the sea, infusing life into this hostile yet vibrant environment, as these flowers “float in perpetual motion.”
For Cocoons I & II (2019), Mona built metal structures covered with wax that she submerged for two weeks in the Dead Sea. The result is crystallized salt cocoons, between natural process and the artist’s hand, a work of four hands that recalls the beauty of the world.
From Ronsard to post-land art, passing through Georgia O’Keeffe, Mona Oren questions wax, the body, nature, and herself. Her multifaceted productions all converge on a common ground, that of the relationship with oneself and the world.
Crédits:
Photo couverture (Home) : Ivana Kalvacheva
Texte : Raphaël Levy
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