Opening reception; Thursday, December 5th, 7-10pm

Softly yet precisely delineated, Nicholas Bierk’s Flower series explores the boundaries of realism and idealism, crafting quietly complex and psychologically resonant paintings. Exhibited at ADZ Gallery in Lisbon as a limited series of five, these compositions challenge traditional genre painting, evoking a subtle yet enduring vibrancy that reinterprets the stillness of nature as an understated assertion of vitality and resilience.

Nicholas Bierk creates works from photographs that accrete into paintings, often years after they are initially captured, and frequently bearing only a sparse resemblance to their origins. This photographic genesis can, however, be subtly traced in the works' contours: some compositions are painted with a deft soft-focus; others with gleaming, pointillist precision. Darkened domestic bric-a-brac, such as cornicing, door frames, and netted tablecloths, is overpowered by the heightened grandeur and sharpness of the blossoms presented.

French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, first published in 1886 and affronting a literary public with its shifting collection of short, symbolist vignettes, was described by the poet himself as “a long, prodigious, and reasoned disordering of all the senses.” While their fragmentary nature recalled the romantic ruin, their imagist potency foreshadowed surrealist preoccupations with the machinations of the inner psyche and modes of transformation and transcendence.

Rimbaud’s Fleurs unfurls through a series of aspatial, opulent associations. Through experiential prose, the text creates a rich montage of material, images, and textures: bronze, agate, mahogany, and satin. Rimbaud’s use of abstract, impossible correlatives untethers flowers from form, creating an opiate of heady, sensory association. The work revels in an otherworldly, transcendent placelessness, set against a backdrop of fin-de-siècle decadence and ennui.

From medieval Memento Mori to 17th-century Dutch Vanitas paintings, flowers have long provided poets, painters, and thinkers with potent symbolic material, often recalling the fleeting nature of life and the futility of earthly pleasures. Since time immemorial, floral still lifes have acted as touchstones for allegorical modes, their use of staging creating strange temporalities that allude to transience, transformation, and decay.

Viewed in the context of Rimbaud’s Fleurs, Nicholas Bierk’s works reflect, transform, and quietly subvert this allegorical mode. A latent eschatological ennui is overcome by images of opulence: glittering silver vases, fulsome rosy buds, and exquisitely lit, undulating petals create a central tension between decadence and mortality. In one work, buttery dandelions, chrysanthemums, and rosemary spring from a burnished silver goblet, glinting in candlelight. In another, pining tulips are consumed by darkness, their implied majesty muted by shadow.

Working across a spectrum of obscurity and luminescence, Bierk’s reconciliation of the barren and the opulent, the domestic and the decadent, conviction and longing, attests to beauty prevailing even in darkness.

Written by Lydia Earthly