Artist Profile
Flora Mottini
on gentleness
Portrait of artist by Estelle Spirig
Immersion is important for Swiss artist Flora Mottini. Every year, she travels during the winter months to a secluded location that possesses the qualities her work radiates. In her landscapes, weightless cartoon-like entities float through a vast expanse of gentle slopes. The levity of her shapes speaks to universal human themes - the confoundingly bountiful possibilities of a life, the loneliness of our journeys through it, and the longing to transcend the shackles of earth-bound corporeality. Her rich use of colour and texture induces a dream-like state. To immerse into her work is to let the self morph into a levitating set of eyes that travels the length of her technicolour world unscathed.
Flora lives in Geneva, where she was raised by parents who worked in aviation. She flies often but always returns home to a country she sees as a calming shelter. Her work references skyscapes, navigation and sometimes literally, the view from a plane. Much could be said about the way identity dissolves when we fly. One could speak of “taking off”, “flying” and “landing” states of mind. Planes are transitional spaces on a journey through a planet - a dissolution of permanence. This metallic bubble acts as a buffer between us and the world below. From such heights, landscapes represent unadulterated possibility: cloud 'orographies' can seem as habitable as the rolling hills below. This calculated distance from real-world subjects is posited in her practice as a necessary condition for poetic alternatives to conventional historicism.
Figuration as a language was a self-imposed challenge for Flora. It is daunting to express a feeling through concrete, figurative elements without appealing to symbols. Because her landscapes are real - they are echoes of places, mindscapes she likes to retreat to. Her method reflects an interest in the mysterious ways the brain digests reality, as much of her practice relies on the furtive moments of clarity that emerge from these passive background processes. She is adept at curating a mental catalogue of sensory references that nourish her unconscious, prompting it to sublimate them into a purer, unified version of the original experiences. Some of the sources she cites as part of this sensory catalogue, which functions as a switchboard for her practice, are Ken Price, magical realism, psychedelia, colour field painting, surrealism and sci-fi. Flora feels a particular kinship with painter Georgia O'Keefe in that she eventually came to paint the landscape she was immersed in.
Flora lives in Geneva, where she was raised by parents who worked in aviation. She flies often but always returns home to a country she sees as a calming shelter. Her work references skyscapes, navigation and sometimes literally, the view from a plane. Much could be said about the way identity dissolves when we fly. One could speak of “taking off”, “flying” and “landing” states of mind. Planes are transitional spaces on a journey through a planet - a dissolution of permanence. This metallic bubble acts as a buffer between us and the world below. From such heights, landscapes represent unadulterated possibility: cloud 'orographies' can seem as habitable as the rolling hills below. This calculated distance from real-world subjects is posited in her practice as a necessary condition for poetic alternatives to conventional historicism.
Figuration as a language was a self-imposed challenge for Flora. It is daunting to express a feeling through concrete, figurative elements without appealing to symbols. Because her landscapes are real - they are echoes of places, mindscapes she likes to retreat to. Her method reflects an interest in the mysterious ways the brain digests reality, as much of her practice relies on the furtive moments of clarity that emerge from these passive background processes. She is adept at curating a mental catalogue of sensory references that nourish her unconscious, prompting it to sublimate them into a purer, unified version of the original experiences. Some of the sources she cites as part of this sensory catalogue, which functions as a switchboard for her practice, are Ken Price, magical realism, psychedelia, colour field painting, surrealism and sci-fi. Flora feels a particular kinship with painter Georgia O'Keefe in that she eventually came to paint the landscape she was immersed in.
The avatars that inhabit her mindscapes and mediate this immersion take the shape of smears. Smears are an animation device used to save time in the otherwise onerous task of animating a scene. In her work, they become metaphor. When applied to the rubbery, pre-Cartoon Modern aesthetic Flora favours, the result is distilled plasticity. She loves to massage her characters into soft shapes that convey the invisible air that swells inside and floats around these solitary subjects. The characters' elasticity mirrors the ever-dilating timeline where her work takes place, as well as their perpetual state of motion.
A key drive in her practice is a fascination with the way materials transform and become. She strives for tactility and sensory stimulation both in her visual language and the mediums she champions. As a student, she experimented with toile de molleton and trempage, finding both unsuitable as she wanted a medium that allowed gradients to be perfectly smooth. She echoes the journeys of the Finish fetish movement members through technical experimentation, and towards the complete erasure of the artist's hand. The works in MEDIANOCHE0's collection use a technique she adapted from industrial design - anodisation. During fabrication, her characters' mutability is mirrored by the mutability of the metal and the poetry of a process that involves the characters on the plates being submerged into large tanks of coloured solution. View artworks ︎︎︎
Flora lives and works in Geneva. After obtaining a BA in Visual Arts from ECAL, Flora worked at the same institution for two years before transferring to HEAD to continue her training as WorkMaster. She has exhibited at Halle Nord, La Ferme de la Chapelle and Spazio Lampo, and at institutions like La Placette and Espace Quark. She is the recipient of the Prix Ernest Manganel and grants from the Fondation Walter & Eve Kent and the Fondation Engelberts.
A key drive in her practice is a fascination with the way materials transform and become. She strives for tactility and sensory stimulation both in her visual language and the mediums she champions. As a student, she experimented with toile de molleton and trempage, finding both unsuitable as she wanted a medium that allowed gradients to be perfectly smooth. She echoes the journeys of the Finish fetish movement members through technical experimentation, and towards the complete erasure of the artist's hand. The works in MEDIANOCHE0's collection use a technique she adapted from industrial design - anodisation. During fabrication, her characters' mutability is mirrored by the mutability of the metal and the poetry of a process that involves the characters on the plates being submerged into large tanks of coloured solution. View artworks ︎︎︎
Flora lives and works in Geneva. After obtaining a BA in Visual Arts from ECAL, Flora worked at the same institution for two years before transferring to HEAD to continue her training as WorkMaster. She has exhibited at Halle Nord, La Ferme de la Chapelle and Spazio Lampo, and at institutions like La Placette and Espace Quark. She is the recipient of the Prix Ernest Manganel and grants from the Fondation Walter & Eve Kent and the Fondation Engelberts.