Somebody will say that it’s just the «lifting» of memory that makes your past unforgettable, effacing troubles and enhancing only your best recollections, that warm your heart. And yet that’s not the case of Felipe Cardeña gardens. For me, they are a kind of time machine. His floral aquariums – it’s not by chance if the first non-flower to appear in his collages was a lost and frightened little fish! – are the background of the Sixties, of «my» Sixties. Or better, of the second half of the Sixties. To be even more exact, of the last years of the second half, that’s to say almost of the Seventies. They are the flowers of the Flower Children, printed on my first real necktie (still a boy tie, but without the rubber band), the one my father bought me just in the years when I was sliding into my «mangiadischi» (a portable record player with a slot-in mechanism) A Whiter Shade of Pale, by the British band Procol Harum, in the Dik Dik Italian cover: I went into rapture when I could take a glance at one of the rare Beatles photos I was able to get, or at the sleeve of the LP collection of their Oldies.

On the sleeves of the 45 rpm records, in the illustrated magazines of the time, and even in the ads of Carosello (but only the «younger» ones), there were always bunches of flowers: designed, cutout, printed on shirts, embroidered on jackets, or put in the hair. At last, flowers had arrived even on the necktie, that I slipped over my head, not to undo the knot. Me too, at last I had something beat, hippie, rock on me: when you are a child, you are just mixing up things. I had become if not a real flower child, at least a supporter, I had a share in that world of peace, love, colours and tattoos, long hair and beads, smiles, music and thoughtlessness that I believed could last forever. That for me was real life, not a moment of it.

I still have the necktie, but the world it opened to me, is gone.

It survives only in revivals, that cyclically amputate it – psychedelia in music and graphics, in low waisted-jeans and exposed navels – in artistic quotes, in sociological essays that identify it as a period of time sometimes to be forgotten, sometimes to be regretted.  But the spirit that was animating it, the wind that was blowing on everything, that everyone was breathing (and so did I), is no longer blowing. Now to me it doesn’t matter to understand why it happened, whether it was only a naive illusion, an utopia, or whether in the end the power overcame imagination, whether freedom and revolution ideals had been destroyed by drugs, whether the dream did crush at Woodstock or had already vanished while the Rolling Stones were writing You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Anyway, I’m sure I never felt it again. I’m sure that I grew up treasuring in my heart more than in my mind the memory and the warmth of a positive wave. Perhaps hoping, unconsciously, that something could lit it again… and that one day my necktie would be of use again, sooner or later.

Felipe Cardeña awakened that world, that emotion again.

His collages, and above all his flowers, but also citrus fruit, vegetables, camouflaged animals among gardenias, peonies, azaleas and myosotis, are a gust of that wind that blew in 1967 and got up to us. They are flowers planted in the Summer of Love, with the soundtrack of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, and they are blossoming forty years later. They are the children of the magic bus of the Merry Pranksters of Ken Kesey, with a stoned Neal Cassady at the wheel (that inspired Jack Kerouac’s On the Road) and of the psychedelic Rolls Royce limo of John Lennon; of the Swingin’ London and of the Pink Floyd visionary, of the cotton fabric for kids from which Paul Smith made his floral shirts, that you could buy at clothing boutiques like I Was Lord Kirchener’s Valet in Kings Road, Chelsea, a favorite store of Jimi Hendrix. They are primeval gardens, symbols of the back-to-nature counterculture movement of San Francisco, they are coming back as a background of a world that the Blue Meanies turned more and more gray, as Lennon and McCartney had foreseen in the animated feature film Yellow Submarine, by the producer George Dunning.

It’s almost as if the flowers placed in the barrels of police guns by pacifists, or the flower that a young girl, in the most celebrated picture taken by Marc Riboud, was holding in her hands, standing in front of several rifle-wielding soldiers stationed in Washington DC to block the protest against America’s involvement in Vietnam, had come back to us, and had been pasted on Cardeña canvases of the Hindu period, together with the stylized flower logo of Mary Quant, and the colors of The Fool collective that painted the exterior of the Apple Boutique in London, and the wonders Alice met along her journey in a fantasy world, and the fantastic visions drawn by illustrators such as Mati Klarwein,  John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham and Henry J. Ford, that stimulated the psychedelic culture of the period.

But Felipe Cardeña, somebody could object, was born in 1979, in the so-called Italian «years of lead», one year after Moro’s assassination. Felipe, being a Spanish artist, is perhaps nearer to the movida of Almodóvar than to the Flower Power and the rock meetings, the Human Be-in and hippie communities. (And more than that, he never had a floral necktie, bought and worn while the air resounded with the notes of All You Need is Love.)

But what does it matter? The pacifist meetings against the war in Vietnam, the lyrics of the musical Hair, the university occupations, the tennis game in Blow up, the Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys have gone into the washing machine of Felipe’s memory and have been tumble-dried. Felipe read the Freak Brothers strips by Gilbert Shelton and Poema a fumetti, a comic book by Dino Buzzati; he wandered around with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, among «tangerine trees and marmalade skies» and «cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head», «that grow so incredibly high». He has looked at the collages (and drawings) the Australian artist Martin Sharp made for Oz, and the Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, the album sleeves of the Flower Pot Men of Let’s Go to San Francisco and Midsummer Dreaming, the photographs of the Beatles in India, at the side of the Maha­rishi Mahesh Yogi, and Donovan and Mia Farrow wearing flowers wreaths around their necks – and he metabolized all of this.

With his memories and the continuous flow of images, Felipe did what later he did with the scissors. As if they were a tridimensional prolongation of his mind. He has seen, lost, found again, cut, assembled, mixed, pasted them – and the choice of collage was the perfect one – to rearrange everything in a new story.

There’s not an inch free in his works, and yet there’s no chaos. You couldn’t believe it at first sight, but at a more careful glance, you’ll get a totally different impression. And if you let your eyes get nearer to the canvas, free to fly from flower to flower, like bees, you could be swallowed up. Sucked by the beauty of that natural Shangrila, by its peace. There’s harmony, in the landscape. We can hear sitar chords, we can smell perfumes, we can feel the sounds of nature, India, wetness.

Playing with the modern technique of «cut and paste» – akin to «copy and paste» but much more audacious and radical – the gardens of Felipe Cardeña have become a state of consciousness (or of hallucination?), a visual trip, the artistic representation of the lysergic trips prescribed as a treatment by Timothy Leary «to expand human consciousness», and sang by the Jefferson Airplane in White Rabbit, a real hymn to hallucinogens.

Just look at Felipe’s works: his collages are not memory albums, but flashes, fragments of what is beyond the doors of perception (from which the name of the rock band The Doors). They are oneiric postcards, open-eyed dreams, difficult to interpret, as dreams always are. Seemingly simple, but impalpable, unseizable, elusive, as soon as you try to tell them.

At the beginning they were Eden gardens, with flowers and fruit, lemons and beet-roots. Later, little by little, they became inhabited, first by sea creatures, then by Adam and Eve’s offspring. And then those gardens became backgrounds, wings, scenes, where the most diverse characters were moving. Animals, Ladies with the Ermine and fairies wearing burkas, Madonnas and Buddhas, topical people, of yesterday and today, comic-strip heroes and television faces, futurists wearing hat and coat, bolide cars.

And Dark Ladies, as in the exhibition The Black Dahlia, that steals its title from a famous novel by James Ellroy, inspired to the true story of the unsolved Elizabeth Short murder, a wannabe actress that in the post war period was found severely mutilated in Los Angeles, her body sliced in half at the waist. Ellroy developed an obsession with the deep laceration on her face, slashed from the corners of her mouth toward her ears, that made appear Short was smiling, almost mocking at her own gruesome wounds.

Anyhow, women in Cardeña canvases aren’t victims (at least they don’t seem so), but femmes fatales in every respect, leaving the defeated role to the unlucky Elizabeth, to become instead executioners. Bad girls, female killers from the movies or from the crime news, who overthrow the patriarchal order and defy men on their own field, the field of power, of strength, of trick, of cynicism, without a moment’s hesitation to use their charm and beauty in order to manipulate men at their own liking and to reach their aim. They are sisters of Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, who seduces the young insurance salesman to kill her old husband and pocket the money of the «double indemnity»; of Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (even though she had her most dramatic and important role at the trial for the murder of her «man», the gangster Johnny Stompanato); they are cousins to Jane Greer, in Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur; to Rita Hayworth in Gilda, with her long gloves and a cigarette in her hand, to Bette Davis in The Letter, to Ava Gardner in My Forbidden Past…

Blonde as Lizabeth Scott, brunette as Joan Bennett or red-haired as Rita Hayworth, stealing from them gestures and hair dressing, in Cardeña works they become noir frames, blossoming in pop screens. Beautiful, nasty women with perfect make-up, silk stockings, smart dresses; they are clever and independent females, (anti)dolls, sweet and troubling, shameless and sure, as Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not, directed by Howard Hawks, ready to run at a simple whistle of Bo­gart: «You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.»

Anyhow, Felipe is not looking at the cinema, he’s not cutting scenes from movies, to put them on the canvas. He pillages instead the jackets of the American magazines of True Crime of the Twenties, Thirties, Forties and Fifties (which take inspiration from the cinema). Felipe decontextualizes them and plunges them into waters with flowers, vegetables, animals and fruit (perhaps, the victim corpse has been concealed behind the background of gardenias and brooms, anemones and primroses?). Felipe likes better the drawings because they have much more narrative power than photos. They are able to make more evocative the web of references among illustrations, movies and news reports. But be careful: the Spanish artist’s collages, in line with the ones by John Heartfield and George Grosz, who used them as a satirical weapon against the nazis, are also able to interpret reality, to read it again, they are able to be satirical, to admonish and criticize, denounce and be ironic. They offer a different point of view over front page news, as you can see in his drawings in ArsLife.com site.

Therefore, his hippie, psychedelic, colorful, ecological and ecologist, imaginary and fantastic background, becomes an amplifier, it enhances the meaning of the images it frames, rendering their language more straight and provocative: universal; and leading the onlooker to muse, to think as he is shocked by a short-circuit between flowers and figures.

At the same time, the wind of the Sixties that is blowing from his canvases and carries smells and colours up to us, enveloping everything (women with the gun and British uxoricide kings), and revives the power of dreams, reminds us that even behind the darkest and worst moments of life, even behind the most unfair and painful events, there’s always a blossoming flower.

All you need is flower (flower is all we need).

Kitsch is dead. Felipe killed it.
One moment of silence for the deceased.
Kitsch is born again. Felipe is its father.
A millennium of feasts for the newborn.
Long live Felipe, long live the kitsch.
Long live the spectator.

Where did your passion for art and everything about it come from?
It’s an «affliction» I’ve been suffering from since I was a young boy. When I was little, one of my uncles, a former priest (a rather unusual, slightly Almodovarian fellow, who had been thrown out of the Church for some very mysterious goings-on of his, which it was strictly forbidden to mention in the family fold), would take me along with him on long «cultural» trips. We went to Madrid (feasting greedily on the paintings at the Prado), Barcelona (the Sagrada Familia was my teen «revelation»), but we also went around Italy, because he had Italian origins (my mother’s family is Italian). That’s how I grew up with a strange, almost obsessive adoration of certain Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Spanish painting, but also Italian painting… I was really into El Greco, Velázquez, Goya and Caravaggio, along with sci-fi fantasy comics like Enki Bilal, Moebius and Ranxerox… then when I was about twenty, I «swerved» into Pop Art (Warhol, Lichtenstein, Basquiat and Keith Haring) as well as American Marvel comic strips and unrivalled masterpieces like Frank Miller’s Batman. Finally, my fortuitous encounter with an extraordinary character, the psychedelic painter Mati Klarwein (who did the famous cover artwork for Santana’s Abraxas LP) in Majorca made me decide to become an artist. 

When did you start painting?
I’ve never really painted. I’ve sketched, built sculptures out of all sorts of materials, done collages… 

You’re not a conventional artist. Besides shows and exhibitions, you’ve made your name with less conventional, often surprise performances. Tell us about them…
I started out stealing into shows that I wasn’t invited to. In Madrid, I impersonated «living statues» at the entrance of group shows… people usually took me for a street artist and in effect I kind of was one. I dressed as a «statue» and stood outside the main door, stock still, for 4 or 5 hours at a time. Then in 2005 through a Spanish friend who was working in Italy in the contemporary art circuit, I was invited to do one of my performances officially for the first time, in a show called Miracolo a Milano. I stood motionless for 6 hours on the trot, inside a wooden box that formed the «base» of the sculpture, with just my head sticking out, impersonating the beheaded John the Baptist…

You define yourself as a sans papier, or paperless, artist. How and why is that?
I’ve never had a fixed abode, apart from when I have been forced into it by extenuating circumstances. 

Who are your artistic references, pictorial and otherwise?
Mati Klarwein, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Wil­liams, Antoni Gaudí, Enki Bilal, Giacomo Balla, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Allen Ginsberg, Marc Ryden, El Greco, Fortunato Depero, Takashi Murakami, Max Ernst, Tanino Liberatore, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, David LaChapelle, Raoul Hausmann, Mimmo Rotella, Keith Haring, Gilbert & George, John Heartfield, Kehinde Wiley, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrea Zucchi, Moebius, Marc Quinn, Richard Hamilton, Colin Christian, Pierre e Gilles, Luigi Ontani, Jeff Koons, Ray Caesar… and Felipe Cardeña. 

You started the Power Flower project at the end of 2007. What does it consist of, how long will it last and what are your next steps?
The Power Flower project, with its collages of coloured flowers in its various forms, is the one which most of my current work gravitates around. Power Flower is the title of one of my small-size collage series (24×30 cm) which has been going on for a couple of years now and is intended to keep going to infinity (to date I’ve done more than 200) but in the broadest sense it’s the theme that all of my current work could be grouped under, consisting of work on the aesthetic and dynamic richness of floral forms.

Why did you choose collage and why flowers?
My love for collage «bloomed» three years ago, during an extremely difficult period of my life, when I was forced to stay «stuck» in one place for a long time, without any contact with my world and my old friends. That’s where the spontaneous choice of a meticulous, monotone technique came from, repetitive to the point of obsession: the act of cutting flowers, then sticking them onto the canvas one by one, ad infinitum, had and still has an apotropaic and releasing magic healing power (or to quote Jodorowsky, I could define it as «psycho-magic»). It’s like chanting a mantra or saying a prayer or fingering a string of rosary beads, one by one. It helps you think, but it also helps free the mind, reconcile you with the latent forces of the universe, dream of «other» dimensions, escape, take a flight of fantasy and feel «free» even if you aren’t in what we call «real» life.
Flowers are a natural and in a certain sense inevitable choice. They’re the richest, most beautiful shapes in Nature and in the curiosity of their thousand different forms and extraordinary shades of colour… there’s the pattern, the fantastic «set» in which I build my stories, my world and that imaginary geography of the crazy universe that I call «Cardeñaland». 

The flower as an object of pictorial and photographic art has noble, important references. In the Twentieth Century alone, you only need to think of Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe. And now Felipe Cardeña…
There are extraordinary testimonies of flowers in art, both past and contemporary. I love flowers in art when they become both a decorative and highly symbolic element: from Georgia O’Keeffe, naturally, to the tenuous flowers of «marchesino pittore» Filippo de Pisis, symbolic of Nature’s frailty and sensuality, to the mountains of flowers spilled onto canvas by Alma Tadema. You only have to think of his masterpiece, Le rose di Eliogabalo, where an array of roses frames the emperor’s women… (D’Annunzio compared Alma Tadema’s painting to a «rare piece of silverware, something like a finely cut jewel, a sculpted, engraved ivory, a meticulously fretworked alabaster». I have this dream of believing that, who knows, he might have said that about one of my collages too…).
But among my contemporaries, I believe that Marc Quinn has reached an extraordinary peak with his Frozen Garden made of frozen flowers, plunged into liquid silicone at minus 20 degrees. It’s a miracle of pure form, in which the garden becomes an absolute, impossible work, in perfect equilibrium between natural charm and artificial creation… just as on the other hand some of the Eighteenth century botanical curiosities and «marvels» also were… 

Your recent works also remind some people of compositions by Gilbert & George and David LaChapelle.
I adore Gilbert & George’s work, and I consider David LaChapelle to be one of the best contemporary artists, at least among the ones using photography. I owe a lot to both in terms of aesthetics. I’m not forgetting the work by Pierre et Gilles who, as Jeff Koons said, «they’re always looking for beauty in everything». I push myself to do the same thing as well… 

One recent series of your works is entitled The Black Dahlia. Who and what inspired you? The most obvious references seem to be Fifties America, pin-up girls and noir culture. What else is there?
It was homage to all of that, of course. James Ellroy’s cult novel, The Black Dahlia, was one of my big loves in my teens. That’s where I discovered that the «dark side» of human nature should not be removed or demonized; it should be understood, studied and researched. I mean, you have to deal with it day after day. Anyhow, I’ve always been fascinated by crime reporting and I’ve always loved both film noir and noir novels.

Your giant format collages recently went as far as Cuba.
A Cuban poetess and «cultural mover», Ana Pedroso, fell in love with my work and asked me to create a site specific piece for Arte Mas 2009, the Festival Internacional de Arte y Literatura Joven that she was curating. I decided to re-work the traditional iconography of El Che – which is nowadays a pure Pop symbol in every aspect, on the same scale as Mao, Marilyn or the Dalai Lama –, submerging it in a rich, brightly coloured floral background: I chose a line from a famous Cuban song, Cuba es un jardín de rosas for its title. I then reproduced the work in a series of huge panels more than three metres across, which were hung in different strategic points around Havana. The original work was then donated to the Municipalidad de Havana, which gave it a permanent installation at the Academy of Fine Arts. 

What’s next after flowers and collages?
Collage and flowers are now part of my world, and I don’t think I’ll be able to abandon them that easily. It’s more likely that I will add in other techniques with collage. Recently, for example, I have created some «floral sculptures», using fabric flowers which I stitch and embroider, using scraps of different material, different colour cloth, words and slogans embroidered on the leaves and petals… I would like to make the second motto of Futurism mine, according to which you can «rebuild the universe, making it a happier place, by fully recreating it». Felipe’s flowers will inevitably break free of the canvas surface to freely invade the world…

You don’t really like talking about yourself. Can we at least know where you live and with whom?
Where do I live? What a question! In Cardeñaland, right? 

What’s been your greatest satisfaction up until now?
Bringing bursts of happiness to people who love my work. 

Tell me about a dream that you want to make reality (artistic, but not only that).
I dream of being invited to create a house completely overrun with my flowers: there are flowers on all the walls, doors, ornaments, furniture, rugs, beds, and flowers sprouting out of the walls, bursting out of the bathroom taps and spilling out of the cupboards and in through the windows. And in the garden too, there’s an avalanche of flowers: real, fake, artificial, cultivated, wild, exotic, European, all mixed up in an infinite, overflowing maelstrom… 

What is contemporary art for you?
A world where nothing is impossible. 

Are you a collector?
It’s more a case of collecting works by artist friends with whom I sometimes swap work, or with whom I often create works with two pairs of hands. I have for example done quite a few different works with Ukrainian painter Svitlana Grebenyuk. 

Apart from yourself, name another contemporary artist to watch, and tell us why.
Paolo Schmidlin. He’s one of the best contemporary sculptors because of his disenchanted, highly elegant and at time cruel treatment of the obsession with beauty and youth beyond all natural limits, that dictatorship of artificial beauty that governs contemporary society. 

In 50 years time, what would you like to leave behind?
The paintings of a bizarre artist who’s just a little different from everyone else and who invented a crazy, crazy, crazy world made entirely out of flowers. 

Who is Felipe Cardeña?
An artist who has tried to turn chaos into beauty, and the difficulty of living into eternal aesthetic joy.

— Psychogeography
— The game
— Détournement
— Control of techniques of conditioning
— Industrial painting

Felipe Cardeña’s career can be viewed as a passage through each of these phases in an updated, revised version, to get to Collage Art with a new, more conscious perspective on the history of art and life experience.

Psychogeography
The first act of this tragicomedy would have occurred – according to Cardeña biographies – in Madrid, where the artist posed as a «living statue» in front of the entrance to exhibition spaces with the provocative, destabilizing spirit that accompanies the Situationist practice of psychogeography: a new approach to urban, artistic phenomena based on alienation experienced within the space, according to the «drift» method, meaning the disorientation of passion through hasty change in environment. The weakness and vagueness of early experiences, of which no documented trace is left, are sticking to the Situationist spirit, due to their lack of documentation and therefore of practical purpose for the future «career» of the artist (contrary to what are doing today many street artists who make their ephemeral works merely in order to document them and «make them live» in the media space).
His first official participation in the 2005 Miracolo a Milano public show at the Palazzo della Ragione in Milan, curated by Alessandro Riva, coincided with these elements. Here, the artist stood motionless for six hours inside a wooden box, with just his head sticking out, in order to impersonate the beheaded Saint John the Baptist. (While for the previous experiences we have to rely on the biography of the artist, I have a personal direct memory of this performance, as I was present at the vernissage.) It was a long, exhausting exercise that would have tested anyone’s limits and which meant a kind of initiation for Cardeña into the Italian show circuit, which wiped out any preconceived ideas of the artist’s about art and its functions in this decontextualization of roles and spaces. In the same vein, the following year in the exhibition curated by me and dedicated to the finalists of the second edition of the Italian Factory Prize for Young Italian painting, at the Casa del Pane in Milan, the artist played an old «loco» (or a ghost?) closed in the attic of the exhibition space, from where he threw invectives in Spanish to the appalled visitors of the exhibition.

The game
From this point on, Cardeña was involved in several group shows with a series of sculptures like Ecce Woman in polychrome plastic or Ardor Guerriero in polychrome wood, ready-made objects imitating the second article of the Situationist game. Compared to the classical understanding of «the game», the ludic aspects of separation from actual life are denied in this behavior, yet on the contrary there’s an inherent moral stance, which is intended to restore a sense of trust and hope in the face of pacific yet unwavering militancy within the ranks of art and in society – using the practice of ready-made in the form of holy and devotional statuettes of the Sacred Heart or the Crusader. 

Détournement
The third phase consists of actions of détournement as the loss of importance of the original meaning of every single autonomous element and the organization of another signifying ensemble, which gives every item a new range. It was an operation that Felipe Cardeña had already embarked on in his artistic activity involving the ready-made form and which would culminate in Collage Art. In this phase, the goal is a work which loses its autonomous artistic value in order to be presented as negation of art, above all because of the immediate, revolutionary communication it possesses. The epigraph on marble (exposed in Milan, at the Flash Art Fair, in 2006) which recites one of Jean-Michael Basquiat’s mottoes, «I don’t know anyone who needs a critic to find out what art is» is an example of the lucid, disarming awareness of the detachment between what art actually is (its essence) and what is a direct consequence of it (the critique system that gravitates around it). Here the détournement consists in attributing a primordial value to a pre-existing reference system (art). The same behaviour of new semantic appropriation was also present in the clandestine gesture with which he put up a pirate flag over the entrance of the PAC, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan during the Street Art Sweet Art show as a metaphor of the physical and spiritual colonization of the spaces assigned to contemporary art by street artists, who are commonly considered to be outside the system.

Control of techniques of conditioning
The fourth phase of this progressive growth refers to the subject of control of techniques of conditioning. Nowadays we can rightly state that advertising and the media offer new and extraordinarily effective tools of conditioning. Subliminal information and brain washing are examples still used today. For this reason these influencing and manipulating techniques must not remain the monopoly of power but should be used in a revolutionary direction. New artists could thus become «secret persuaders» not to conformism but to freedom. Some clandestine activities, which are represented by satire and caricature in the case of media communication, lay within this sphere, competing with official power. Felipe Cardeña has been using this Situationist tactic since 2009 with his Felipe Cartoon project published weekly on the ArsLife.com site. He creates a derogatory, burlesque vignette in his collage style, featuring a character or event from Italian or international news which has been in the limelight in the daily papers or TV. As in a sort of column consisting of images, Felipe’s cartoons cover politics, crime reporting, culture, economics, gossip and literature with his witty, ironic spirit, seeking to swing the balance of the scales of information in favour of freedom of expression in art. Characters like Obama, Berlusconi, the Pope and Michael Jackson or events like the situation in Gaza, the Eluana Englaro case, safety in Italy, the «Videocracy» affair and the censorship problem among many others have all been given the treatment in this story of his that condenses real time news. 

Industrial painting
Lastly, as regards the last point in the Situationist manifesto, the idea of «industrial painting» is called in, which however has nothing to do with industrial design, because it does not suggest a model to be reproduced, but rather refers to Pinot Gallizio’s individual rolled-up canvases, over a hundred meters in length at times.
In Felipe Cardeña’s case, we could link the concept of industrial painting to the serial nature and repetitiveness of his modus operandi in Collage Art which uses a meticulous, obsessive technique dictated by subsequent moments, like an industrial assembly line: cutting fragments, sticking them onto to the canvas one by one, adding in a recognizable icon that provides the whole work with a meaning and then finally applying a top layer of gloss resin.
Collage Art has a very long history that features throughout the Twentieth Century, including the first papier collé. Cubists who glued strips of paper onto the sheet in a flat arrangement, the multi-material, polysemic Surrealist sample, the «relief colour forms» of the Futurists and the American assemblage and Combine Paintings of the Sixties.
Felipe Cardeña’s study is also entrenched in this tradition, although it moves away from a prevalently material habit of matching fragments towards a preliminary choice of images taken from varied sources and then placed in a phantasmagoric context, which recalls the floral wallpapers (papier peint, papier tenture).
The concept that the artist refers to is that of creating an inflation of traditional artistic values in such a way as to compromise their survival. This inflation is nothing but the crowding together of signs and images found in his Collage Art, intended as a revolution in playing, continuous creation and destruction, perennial change and incessant semantic shift. Felipe Cardeña’s collages on canvas are brightly-coloured, multi-form puzzles that huddle together in the frenetic overlapping of flower and fruit shapes, cut out of gardening and DIY magazines with painstaking precision. Dotted here and there, the isolated image of a votive icon, the bust of a Roman emperor or the portrait of a Renaissance courtesan, the effigy of an Indian saint or an African tribal mask, and again the sexy heroine of a Marvel comic or the Dark Lady of a Forties spy story (like The Black Dahlia) peep out from within this composite flora to ratify the total loss of spatial and temporal references.
As regards the latest series of Power Flower  works, Felipe Cardeña’s study focuses on three common themes: Hindu divinities, the iconographies of the history of art and the personalities of the Star System. These three apparently different historical and cultural narrations in reality have common corresponding elements, but are above all symbolic of the complexity of the universe and the methods of decoding to the public.
In the case of the Hindu religion, for example, Ganesh, the god with the head of an elephant; Krishna, one of the most popular, widely worshipped divinities, the Avatar with dark blue skin, and Kali, the consort of Shiva, the goddess of destruction and death. These are images taken from giant posters which are presented in the form of cartoon portrayals, with garish colours and a number of tiny details camouflaging with the background which at first glance seem to function as mere space-fillers but which actually reveal profound messages (such as the swastika, the flute and pearls) and leave you to ponder the complexity of the most ancient religion in the world.
Moving onto the iconographies taken from the history of art, the range includes Giotto’s Tre Marie to Botticelli’s page boys and Lucas Cranach’s Judith with the head of Holofernes to Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with the Ermine. Different styles and eras are flattened down by the floral collage background which eliminates initial contexts and historical placements from the portrayals and allows the gaze of the figure with its symbolic charge of meanings and psychological and emotional references to shine through.
On the subject of famous people from history, power or the news, already examined in the Felipe Cartoon project, the scene involves legendary figures like the Dalai Lama, Obama, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Rocky, Mao and Che Guevara. These are subjects of different social and political extraction, who have often fulfilled strategic political roles or predicted great changes in music and customs, here on the contrary returned to their identity as depersonalized, standardized pop icons, capable of endless visual regeneration. Reducing the mythical and heroic to kitsch pop icon on a multi-coloured, psychedelic background, unequivocally homogenous and identical in every work is the perfect vehicle for distancing the image from the complexity and ambiguity of real life and transforming it into a stereotype that lives inside an ideal abstraction.
This myriad of drawings and canvases forms a single installation, created by interlocking identical models that alternate in their continuous variety of shapes and colours and the condensation or rarefaction of their appearance, in a kaleidoscope of fluorescent colours that recall total psychedelia.
The emergence of an iconographic collection, which is different in its types, eras and origins, witnesses and documents the predatory sacking within the language of the history of art and the lexis of visual communication, in a horror vacui where codes of high and low culture intermingle. As Pablo Picasso already stated with his motto, «Bad artists copy, great artists steal», the theft of image and icon is truly the stuff of the great artistic personalities because, when they have become aware of a problem or emergency, they can recuperate their stimuli from different expressive environments, relocating them in a privileged, critical position with the accentuation of a particular order of ideas or meanings.
The importance of this process lies in the fact that, through it, subjects and images strictly bound to society, religion, culture, literature and both the Western and Eastern imagination are removed from their destination and placed in a qualitatively different context or in a revolutionary perspective. It’s a sign that the most sublime things, like the most banal things, can, on an unconscious and psychological level, be the object of a much deeper appropriation of their simple passive fruition or their economic possession.
The hand that cuts up sheets of coloured paper, old magazines, cardboard boxes, old-fashioned photographs and which gathers and reuses images that are themselves potentially expressive, works along the narrowest borderline between iconoclasty and resemantization of shapes. As Raoul Hausmann stated, you should not read a simple «practice of construction and assembly» into the deployment of the different materials used and their configuration on the surface, but rather a «subjective equivalence between emotional perception and composition». The synthesis of formal oppositions is brought to the highest level of formal expression and emotional impact in Cardeña’s hybrid photography.

Milan, June 2011 

Tiny keepsakes explode from mental compression, ready for cutting. Images that the cynic judges to be mawkish and that he maintains are extremely lovely: it’s all related to determination of the level of tolerance one has for the degree of loveliness. They are all holy pictures of saints that the international imagination supplies, from the eyes of St. Odile to the dragon of George who appears to no longer be a saint, apart from in that little image, which could be declined with the depiction of an Indian demi-god. The carpet thus acquires a centre of gravity, which does not actually explain it but makes it necessary for the ambiguity of the narrative. Worthy of note.
The effect becomes hard to identify: great scope for freedom lies hidden under the appearance of kitsch.

Sansone Felipe Cardeña has a strange, complex biography. There are plenty of strange stories, rumours and gossip associated with his name… he used to be a street mime; well that’s corroborated historical fact, since he was seen by a vast number of people at a 2005 show in Milan (entitled Miracolo a Milano), portraying a headless Saint John the Baptist. In that period he was practising a strange form of street art, sticking paper flowers on the walls in the street, all over the world… that’s also been confirmed, seeing as there are lots of photos from a decade ago, of his flowers stuck up in strategic locations all over the world, including Cuba, Russia, Northern Europe and Thailand. Then his real presence just vanished and, assisted by an actual “studio” of helpers, he launched definitively into art collage, with original compositions on canvas, using paper as the exclusive medium.
Dorfles I already find this really interesting. He’s certainly not just any artist. That’s why it’s really difficult to place him in the contemporary art scene. There have been similar cases in the history of art and literature too, of artists who divest themselves of their own identity as a graceful, conscious gesture, with what you might define as conceptual implications. In my opinion, this element can be filed under kitsch, albeit an extremely cultured, evolved kind of kitsch.
Sansone This is a very important element. Felipe is therefore a kitsch creature, starting with his non-linear and intentionally contradictory biography, modelled as it is to fuel the rumours, gossip and even discussions about changing identity, the sense in creating art and the mechanisms of success in mass civilisation…
Dorfles Of course. Kitsch always and exclusively feeds on and thrives within the mechanisms of mass culture, which are then the greatest driver of “popular kitsch”…
Sansone In your book on kitsch, you actually talked about cultural industrialisation as a founding element in creating popular “common or garden”, triumphant kitsch, much more so than art with a capital A.
Dorfles Yes, even if I’d be careful not to mix three elements that are diametrically different. On the one hand you’ve got kitsch that’s everywhere, the junk you can buy on market stalls or in souvenir shops, then on the other there’s the kitsch of artists who, in the belief that they are creating “highbrow” artworks, actually create bad painting or in any case bad art, in the sense of art of highly questionable taste, and so they end up in unintentional, uncalculated kitsch.  Lastly you have artists – like Salvador Dalì or Enrico Baj, to mention two famous historical examples, but nowadays, too, an unusual and interesting artist like Felipe Cardeña -, who put together refined and extremely cultured, elegant “elitist kitsch” art, almost on the easel, we might say.
Sansone These are the very artists we put together at the Oggi il kitsch exhibition at the 2012 Milan Triennale, which started with legendary names like Dalí, Savinio, Usellini and Meret Oppenheim, and moved onto artists active in the Sixties and Seventies like Enrico Baj, through to examples of today’s very fashionable contemporary artists, like Luigi Ontani, Cracking Art, Corrado Bonomi and, of course, Felipe Cardeña. As well as unusual folk from outside of the art system like Rudy van der Velde.
Dorfles Yes, van der Velde is a different kettle of fish again, I would say, because of his being outside of the artist system. I would define him as an artist who is ‘completely kitsch’ to the core. While in Felipe Cardeña’s case it should be emphasised that this is purposefully kitsch art, elitist kitsch, that’s neither unintentional nor coincidental…
Sansone Highbrow kitsch?
Dorfles Yes, highbrow, elitist, refined… certainly not for the masses. I mean, it’s not the kitsch of a little painting being sold on a market stall. Its elegance actually makes it not so easy to push  on the public, the critics and the market. It’s along the lines of Baj.
Sansone We could define it as conceptual kitsch.
Dorfles Definitely, because it’s kitsch with a background of very strong cultural foundations. Looking at the paintings, you sense an in-depth knowledge of the history of art and the art system mechanisms behind it all. What’s more, Cardeña is also a highly imaginative, creative artist and therefore deserves to be considered as an authentic, not unintentional or amateur artist.
Sansone However it should be stressed that, unlike what happens in a lot of conceptual art, attractiveness and decorativism are not eschewed. On the contrary…
Dorfles Absolutely. Cardeña’s works are really pleasing to the eye, aesthetically rich, exuberant and decorative. But remember that attractiveness, seduction and decorativism are also part of the very essence of kitsch. They’re typical of kitsch art works, both voluntary and not. Think about souvenirs or market stall tat…i t’s very often attractive, entertaining and eye-catching, even if it’s almost always poor taste. Yet even intentionally kitsch works, like those by Baj or Cardeña, play on seduction and attractiveness. The difference with the former is that their attractiveness is vulgar, so to speak, while the latter are more refined, cultured and discerning. We’re talking about a form of refined kitsch used to achieve an anomalous, original, mould-breaking artistic effect.
Sansone The choice of using flowers as a background is also rather unusual, seeing as how throughout the entire Twentieth Century the floral genre was considered the prerogative of second class painting, of petit bourgeois living room, or even pizzeria decorativism…
Dorfles Of course, even this is part of an intentionally anti-conformist aesthetic choice. But the interesting part does not so much lie in the use of the flowers themselves: if Felipe had done a “normal” flower painting, he would be a bog-standard artist of scarce interest. What makes him eccentric and bizarre instead, as well as kitsch, is his superabundance and excess. That’s where Cardeña’s work is coloured in kitsch tones, in excessive decorativism, in choosing not to let the eye breathe and in obsessively filling the surface…
Sansone However the use of flowers also reminds me of Andy Warhol, who rediscovered floral decorativism as pure pop art in the Sixties.
Dorfles It was extremely cultured, refined art in that case too. Warhol totally knew what he was doing.  He wasn’t doing it ingenuously or involuntarily. He knowingly toyed with traditional genres and the motifs of the history of art…
Sansone Felipe is in a certain sense also very “pop”; we could say he’s an artist who sits halfway between kitsch and pop. And then there’s also the continuous referencing and shuffling of discordant elements, taken from newspapers, catalogues, magazines, even real gems stuck onto the canvas…
Dorfles Overlapping elements sourced from different origins is a typical kitsch practice. Not to mention those glittering gems, crystals and beading, which stick out on the canvas… or those rich, oriental style frames… it’s all part and parcel of the mixing and repositioning of genres and cultures that is the quintessence of kitsch, one of its most basic and distinctive features. The reference to gems is furthermore interesting because fashion has always fed on kitsch elements.
Sansone On that subject, here’s an interesting story. The fashion designers Dolce & Gabbana created a t-shirt that looks very like one of Felipe’s works close-up. It almost seems directly inspired by one of his paintings, bearing such a strong resemblance as it does.
Dorfles Ambiguity is another typical feature of kitsch and of contemporary culture in general. One thing always references the other.  Every creation feeds on other creations. Nothing is original any more, in the absolute sense, as it once was.
Sansone As regards ambiguity, Cardeña’s technique is also extremely ambiguous and distracting. Sometimes, when you look at photos of the paintings, you can’t tell if it’s collage or painting, they’re so defined and precise. It certainly brings to mind some Fifteenth Century works painted with tempera grassa, the collage almost disappears…
Dorfles Yes, the technique with which they are composed is essentially not all that important. Even if they were reproduced in their hundreds or thousands, they would never lose their aura of refined elitist artworks. Moreover, like pop, kitsch has taught us that nowadays everything can be reproduced. Every artwork can be infinitely replicated without losing any of its originality and its power. And Felipe Cardeña’s work is no different. Its power lies in the idea behind it and in the final image, not in the technique that was used to create it.

 Milan, June 2013

Many years back, in an exhibition I organized on the theme of flowers, entitled Filosofia dei fiori, I noticed an unspoken, or even openly declared desire to revisit the genre of flowers in the actual contributions of the broad ranging artists. Take note: this is no return to traditional still life with flowers; it’s an exhibition of a relationship between man and nature observed using flowers and delivered symbolically – even when the symbolic path is not the artist’s aim. Such attention, in the many and various languages of contemporary art, is not purely down to strictly pictorial curiosity, but manifests here and there in projects of the broadest ambition by artists who do not express themselves through painting, wholly or not exclusively – we should thus mention the Swiss artists Peter Fischli & David Weiss who years ago presented works on the theme in a show entitled Altri fiori e altre domande, where flowers featured from the exhibition programme with the highly suggestive, closely referenced title onwards.

Cardeña proposes his floral triumphs in what may appear to be a mainly ornamental interpretation. We should however be careful not to jump to conclusions, since his awareness of flowers as a secret of the pondering heart and creative imagination is clearly evident. In the best part of pictorial language, the flower expresses thinking linked to the most varied religious traditions. I’ll only list two examples here, so as not to bore people. The first involves Saint John of the Cross who considered the flower the image of the virtue of the soul – a group of flowers in a bunch therefore represents spiritual perfection, according to his teaching. And Felipe shows us without fear of contradiction. The second example relates to the Tantric Taoist symbolism of the Golden Flower (a Chinese Taoist work on alchemy) which conceives the image of the flower as attainment of a spiritual state, formulating the modern aspiration to total consciousness.

A flower blooming is the result of an inner alchemy, or union of the spirit (tsing) and life force energy (k’i), and of water and fire. The flower has the same value as the elixir of life, and blooming is equal to the return to the centre, unity and the primordial state. And, as for the centre, in this sense it has always featured as the main element of Felipe Cardeña’s descriptions, centralizing it, as we will see later on. He places the key figure at the centre in an attempt to lessen the loss of orientation – even though, amid the great confusion of elements in the foreground and dotted over the surfaces of the work, in a labyrinth like this, although well-known, the main subject mixes up its origin and provenance to our perception.

He makes us aware of possible symbologies in the mass of the collage – perfected with enviable technique and which appears to be loud denial compared to the appeal of its opposite, the legendary décollage. His works are created using scissors, dabs of glue, puzzle construction and pictorial reinvention using existing material – the latter used in remembrance and reinvention. The world of pictorial and imaginative sensitivity is rewritten using what has already been given, written and seen.  The question we ask ourselves when faced with the special effects of Felipe Cardeña’s works is how does one get such a lovely feeling of lightness when viewing an affirmed exaggeration of a collage of cuttings. Differently from minimal experiences in which less is more (as Mies van der Rohe theorized, rigorously observed by the Bauhaus followers), here at casa Cardeña what’s more is elegant without pretence. Inverting the values of a famous phrase of Alberto Moravia’s on Giosetta Fioroni’s work, Felipe adds instead of subtracting, and gives importance to the full space instead of the void. And yet, I repeat, the result is delivered with lightness – in my opinion through further, precise narrative hypothesis and affirmation of a code of exhibitionist irony.

If I had to match the sense of lightness to a musical reference, in Felipe’s works, I think it would link to an indication of motion in the last movement of Giorgio Federico Ghedini’s 1918 Sonata for violin and pianoforte in a major key: Allegro, risvegliato e giocoso [Lively, awakened and playful]. Felipe Cardeña’s works belong to that aspect of a fresh Spring awakening, in that time of year when nature once again declares her presence, reawakening the memories of the world via the senses.

The gift of irony lies in the creative fibres, I would say in the chromosomes, of this artist who plays on the mystery of his own identity, declaring it by surprise, amid the most varied rumours about his physical absence, as if he were irreproducible in the eyes of those who only consider his creative activity.  He’s almost a phantom figure, as Garbo made herself, without doing any more films; and also as our greatest female chanteuse Mina is, presenting her voice in recorded form only. But it is undeniable tautology that Felipe Cardeña’s irony is flagrant in only presenting works. You breathe in great lungfuls of anticipated joy in Felipe Cardeña’s visual creations. Along with the flowers you can see other elements and components, like fruit and vegetables, for example, and then precious stones, jewels, bottles of perfumed essences, trays, plates, dishes, glasses brimming with wine, butterflies, fish and peacocks, decorative motifs and devotional figures, often Oriental, portions of images of paintings from the history of art, comic cuttings, snippets of Oriental writings, advertising labels and glittering gold leaf surfaces. It’s a right royal hotchpotch featuring famous, sometimes extremely famous, images of global cultures, from both West and East. The presence of gems and jewels is further revelation of a study of particularly elegant, sapiential symbologies – normally people think that jewels tell of the vanity of human accoutrements and of desires. But even here, closer interpretation of the symbologies reveals to us that, for their stones, their metals, the forms, the jewels represent esoteric knowledge; often interpretable as substitutes of the soul, or portrayable as such, in the Jungian sense, telling of the unknown wealth of the depths of our soul.

Felipe Cardeña’s works arise out of iconic necessity, formulation of a conscious vision of history, and how much it has pre-empted the deeds of the present, making it possible and guaranteeing it – giving it an implicit and necessary authorization to reference.  Because if there is one thing you can’t take away from Cardeña’s creative imagination, it’s the awareness of a broad, magnificent cultural crossover without hidden surprises – he does not shield himself, he exhibits a culture layered up through study and constantly applied attention, as a nod to his own presence, to the happiness of memory, to the preciousness of the many cultural hypotheses that have perfected an omnivorous curiosity over time and in the creative period of his activity. Felipe Cardeña knows that if we exist, today and as we have been formed and defined, we owe it to everything that has gone before us – and, in the current expansion of every way of seeing things, by virtue of global thinking, to all that has preceded us in the history of the entire world. In this his fantasy is a tireless voyager.

He particularly highlights it in this show which is a collection of works entitled Mythology. Myths compete with men and their history, at all latitudes, in all geographical areas – every culture has managed to create, determine and define its own. And like a bee among flowers, Felipe Cardeña sucks the nectar required for his alchemic transformation from each mythology – from material “lost by memory” in history to incredibly lively, fermenting fertiliser for the dreams of the present.  A transfiguration of the same mythological elements, according to a concept that fuelled so much of Twentieth Century art.

There is a strong presence of pop design, in the abbreviated meaning of popular, in Cardeña. Many references for his imaginative constructions actually belong to a world of popular, if not highly popular, culture, used  because they are well-known and immediately identifiable. Obsessions of popular culture, as many elements sampled from advertising messages will show. Naturally, in a pop dimension, he cannot not play on the collision of various planes in stylistic terms: cultured form and popular form, in the marriage of high and low, base and sublime, stupid and intelligent.

This pop design, referring to an Oriental culture, is comprehensively described in the work The Master of the Day of Judgement, which presents Ganesh with an appearance typical of the iconography which can be found in the representations dedicated to him by the Indian imagination and not only that (just think of the many schools of yoga spread throughout the world).  Ganesh symbolises knowledge, his man’s body refers to the microcosm, and his elephant’s head to the macrocosm. The concept of beginning and end, alpha and omega, is perceived in the portrayal of the elephant. Here, in Felipe’s work, the touch of ironic drift is supplied by the squirrel in the lower part which substitutes the standard presence of the mouse, a reference to the ego to be kept under constant control. And, still at the feet of Ganesh, also by a label with the writing le Leggere [The light ones] on it, which seems to relate to the food on the plate and also in one of the god’s hands, and also on another very similar, but larger plate beneath him – food that could appear to be a reference to the famous episode of Ganesh’s insatiable appetite.

In Helter Skelter – a title that inevitably refers to the famous 1968 Beatles song and whose meaning may reference both the giant spiral slides at funfairs, and also wild disorderly confusion -, the traditional portrayal of Kali who goes from destroying demons to killing men until Shiva stops her, is a further element of culture which can be recognised through the fame of precise images; the title of the Beatles song seems even more appropriate for what happens in this myth. And if Helter Skelter was also an indication of the compositional method of the collage supporting the goddess Kali, in that sense it would look like intelligently perpetrated trickery: because, as I have already mentioned, the order determined by Felipe Cardeña is a harmonious order founded on apparent disorder. Or, to be more specific, like order that comes from chaos, the general overview of Cardeña’s work vibrates from these apparent contradictions.  I will say further that his are images constructed and dissolved in one sitting, living off extreme conceptual situations. We can furthermore hypothesize that Cardeña’s images, thus broken up and re-created, become the vehicle of the most hidden truths, concealed behind chaotic epiphanies.

There is plenty of Indian tradition, therefore. Similar focus on the Indian virtues of Hinduism is also the exercise for practising his own language in the midst of the risks of clichés – not falling into the trap of representing them because they are clichés and fully adhering to that, but giving them visual innovation that passes for the constant, upholding and impossible-to-eliminate game of irony, as I do not tire of asserting, as well as for the richness of visual dressing.  Continuing in the Oriental zone of this Mythology, we can see traces of the Devanāgarī alphabet (of phrases that guard their secrets from the comprehension of we Westerners because of the complexity of this writing), and also Sanskrit and other alphabets of the Indies and Orient – alphabets which often appear in Felipe’s works as memory of voyages linked to myth. We find a fleeting trace of it, like a background soundtrack of words pronounced in accompaniment to the image of Krishna, gentle flute player (Venugopāla) in Golden Flowers. Here the visionariness is welcoming. It does not contain frightening moments of madness unable to resist the destructive impulse like Kali has – we are in a tranquil oasis, which makes us feel welcomed and embraced by the imagination of mysterious music evoked by the simple presence of the flute.

Steering his steps from East to West, Felipe cannot but linger in the area of North African history, between Egypt and Sudan. The Mystery of the Falcon shows a stunning, elaborate portrayal of Horus the falcon, “the Sun God” (it’s no coincidence that the work has a circular format symbolic of the solar disc), earthly incarnation of the Pharaoh, and son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. The bird of prey has outspread wings and is gripping the symbols of life and eternity, therefore of the Pharaoh’s universal power, in its claws. In The Idol, the great sculpted head of the god Sebiumeker stands out on various, again very Oriental figures (the head is from the Meroitic era, from the city of Meroe, near Shendi in Sudan, and has eyes stolen from another statue of similar geographic collocation): Particularly striking is the Chinese gentleman of the Maoist period, top right; and the unexpected presence of a piece of paste jewellery, applied to the surface, innovative gesture of Felipe’s invention.

It’s a short and inevitable hop from the Sudan and from Egypt to Greece – and here we are in front of various prodigies of  Vasari’s mastery in The Golden Age, in Il ritorno degli eroi, in L’armi, gli eroi (where a truly overcome Superman makes his appearance on the background, top left), in The Heroes of War (with Depero figures top right, and a cartoon-type wording – Krak – which seems like a threat of breaking for the marvellous crater). But also, again and above all, here are works that propose sculpted heads which mix up the maps of ancient geography, because from Greece you inevitably then reach Ancient Rome. We can start with Le temps retrouvé, in which a female head with helmet, found on the Greek island of Aegina (first half of the 5^th Century BC), is presented in the crime of flagrant beauty. The head, which sits in the period between final archaism and severe style (500-450 BC) in all probability portrayed the goddess Athena. In an almost challenging gesture before all this beauty, Felipe allowed himself to touch up the eyes – because it’s as if he sensed the grotesque contamination of a mix of the most disparate historical and visual contributions which fill our conscious world.

La Venere dei fiori devotedly proposes Venus di Milo, which overlays a sort of new Venus made of Trovato S.n.c. di Catania Naturel orange wrapping paper. But it is with Le poème de l’angle droit that we reach the ancient shores of Roman culture. Here we run into the Testa di Amazzone from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, from the Augustan era. And we should highlight the very evident contradiction affirmed by Le poème de l’angle droit – title and graphic of the work directly referencing Le Corbusier – where there isn’t even a glimmer of a right angle, each image delivered to a vision taken to the edge of heresy as regards the rationalisms and in favour of fractal art as Mandelbrot formulated it (and in Cardeña, many hints, and not only hints, of fractals appear here and there.)  It’s no coincidence, there’s a confirmation of the idea of it all being a hotchpotch, with the presence of a bag of frozen mixed vegetable soup here.

We continue with the head of Emperor Augustus in Love Song. The Head (27-25 BC) is the one from Meroe, near to Shendi, in Sudan, nowadays at the British Museum in London. In this work we see an unexpected appearance of a De Chirico style glove (entirely stolen from the 1914 oil painting The Song of Love, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), which has shamelessly changed the sculpted head in question, blotting out Belvedere’s Apollo. A sort of marital betrayal, perpetrated by Cardeña’s constant impertinence.

In Metamorfosi del classico we encounter one of the many portrayals of Antinous, Emperor Hadrian’s beloved youth, which takes us immediately back to the realm of Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterpiece. We also recognise futurist air brush paintings top left (Giacomo Balla, Celeste metallico aeroplano (Balbo e Trasvolatori italiani), 1931) and traces of a painting by the Spanish artist Carlos Forns Bada, friend of Felipe, top right. The richness of the imagination is accentuated, intensifying all the challenges of focalizing on components, and proposing a picture puzzle contest in Settimana Enigmistica [Italian puzzle magazine] style. Because we’re dealing with enigmas, not just free associations, in the rabid kaleidoscopic mass.

In fact, the voyage becomes complicated, continuing with The Labyrinths of Memory, showing the famous Laocoön and his sons, and with The Last Memories, with guests Terentius Neo and his wife (from the Pompeii fresco, 55-79 AC), and then adding Antonio Canova’s Three Graces (whose arms and legs Felipe has attempted to break up) in Harmony; to La Grande Odalisque, by Ingres (on whose surface paste jewels appear once again); and to The Mysterious Rituals, with the standing figure sourced from the Orientalist painting A Roman Boat Race of 1889, by Sir Edward John Poynter, and with traces of Perilli style structures, more air brush painting, sketches of cashmere designs, and the usual floral pandemonium and whatever else is visually consumable.

Picture puzzles become a dangerous pursuit, as if people were staring too intensely at thundering fireworks.

Felipe Cardeña’s world takes my memory back to the Flower Power years, whose poetry – which for many in the Sixties meant, and which by way of the intrinsic symbology of flowers still means, a chance to consolidate the desire to exceed normal human perceptions (it’s no coincidence that flowers are inextricably linked with ecstatic visions) – produces founding effects in its poetry. Felipe Cardeña’s works defuse tension because they are works equipped with intentions – they know what they want, they know their own itinerary. Not that he acts like a decidedly late come, born-again hippy – but he sends a message of being convinced that the power of flowers is capable of sanctifying the maniacal behaviour of the paper cuttings. By strange alchemy, these actually become paintings, an installation painting of forms that can and want to declare the word beauty, without exposing themselves to the limits usually set down by a cynical, intellectualised sense of modesty. Moreover and lastly, as I have already described in some of the analyses of the works, preciosities that appear descended from the Eighteenth Century emerge on the surface: glitter, multi-coloured crystals, embroidered fabric jewels, but also Oriental paste jewels – a study of excess of a surface which until now has appeared flat and smooth and which attempts an extroflection of itself, of its own narrative elements, a materialisation of what until a moment before lived only in a world of paper. Which now takes shape, by sheer evocation. Amid such floral pandemonium, you might also ask yourself what scent departs, by synaesthesia, from the visual of these works to reach the olfactory sense. Some labels and bottles and phials suggest N° 5, or 4711, and also Azzaro to us. So, Felipe seems to be telling us, “Unleash your imagination and wake up your senses.” If you look at flowers, you can’t avoid being conscious of their perfume.

A profusion of flowers, therefore: roses, naturally, passion flowers, dahlias, pansies, daisies, poppies, gerbera, orchids, zinnia, and yet more and more and more; drowning sweetly in a sea of flowers that are not allowed to wilt.