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).

Brightly coloured and very floral, directly inspired by his overflowing collage, Felipe Cardeña inaugurates a new production of fun design objects and clothing, always dedicated to Flower Power, where he proposes a particular aspect of his creative activity: the ability to invade, with its flowers, every nook and cranny of our daily lives, starting with the objects for the home.

Renowned for his lush, colourful floral language (a “meticulously detailed language, as obsessive as a cloistered nun’s daily rosary”, as Vittorio Sgarbi defined it), produced using the collage technique, Felipe Cardeña gives a fresh presentation of a particular aspect of his creative activity for the Salone del Mobile – his flair for invading every nook and cranny of our daily lives with his flowers, starting with household objects.

Back in 2011 in the MISIAD (Milano si autoproduce design) exhibition curated by Alessandro Mendini, at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan, Felipe showed a part of his extra-pictorial production – wall clocks, household objects, notebooks, address books, briefcases, but also rather unusual objects, like “artist’s books”, entirely created out of collage, or “artist’s bindings” for collected sets of books. Or certain mysterious ornaments, the so-called “metaphysical objects”, like the “box of deep thoughts”.
In an interview with Aldo Della Vecchia for the Venice Biennale Cuban Pavilion catalogue, Felipe actually said, “I dream of being asked to create a house completely invaded by my flowers, with flowers on all the walls, doors, objects, furniture, rugs and beds, and then flowers sprouting out of the walls, gushing out of the bath taps, bursting out of the wardrobes and windows… And even in the garden, an avalanche of flowers – real, fake, artificial, cultivated, wild, exotic, European, all mixed up together, in an infinite, ever-expanding whirlwind…”

Now he continues his “felipitation” to the domestic world and, in collaboration with the brand Orsorama, has produced a series of pillows and T-shirts, which directly reproduce the themes of his colorful and lush language: a project where, with his unusual language, the artist proposes a “floral reconstruction of the world”, which not only spreads over objects but also all over the surrounding space, almost to the point of creating a fairytale environment, buried under a widespread, omnipresent continuum of flowers, with joyful, eccentric and bizarre overtones.

— 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