Florian Mermin – Rest in Rose, 2024

Florian Mermin’s work is informed by influences from film, literature and philosophy, from Jean Cocteau to Edgar Allan Poe or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It seeks to establish a dialectic between objects and humans, reality and the imagination, the animate and the inanimate, to blur the boundary between inner and outer. His immersive installations engage all of the five senses to explore the artistic and poetic possibilities of living things. His sculptures and ceramics involve natural or artificial plants, fresh or dried flowers, and borrow from the aesthetics of the hybrid, thanks to encounters with fantastic worlds and his quest for “the uncanny”.

Florian Mermin’s sculptures are created for the courtyard of the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Lyon, and make reference to the history of the Palais Saint-Pierre, which in the 19th century was home to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and its “flower class”, where future designers for the Lyon silk industry were trained. In the cloisters, where various essences were grown to serve as models for the students, Rest in Rose, a perfume bottle now stands on top of the fountain, its motifs evoking the flowers in Henri Fantin-Latour’s still lifes from the museum’s collection. With its mixture of vitality and disappearance, Florian Mermin’s work is a new vanity, evoking the fleeting and transient nature of existence.