Flower Painting, the Act of Immortalising

The artist extracted colours from the different flowers of a bouquet (roses, dianthuses, snapdragons, safflowers, alpine delphiniums, chinese delphiniums), leaving the plants pale and colourless. The distilled colour pigments were then conserved in transparent isomalt and displayed in laboratory glass vessels alongside the now-white bouquet.

In traditional still-life paintings, the painted colours of blossoms captured a moment in time and 'defeated' death. In Flower Painting, the Act of Immortalising, Salonen reinterprets this tradition by poetically separating the life energy (the preserved colour) from its empty, pale body (the decoloured flower).