By combining French decorative arts motifs, organic imagery, and contemporary motivations into visual poetry, French artist Alice Riehl’s porcelain wall murals exist in a liminal space between the natural and constructed worlds. Her amplified scale gives way to a surreal, visual cognitive experience. If perspective is needed to get the whole story, numerous details emerge when getting closer to the piece, from subtle touches of glaze to meticulously modeled elements, creating a sense of intimacy with the artwork.
Riehl’s most recent ceramic installation,“Songe” is composed of over forty individually hand-sculpted components. Each is a stylized, imagined rendering of a passion flower plant. Its vines, which draw attractive arabesques, its graphic foliage, its flowers with complex pistils that bloom in the shape of a star, and its fruits that crinkle as they ripen, are all characteristics that seduced and inspired Riehl. In her lyrical installation, the passion flower quite literally climbs up the wall as it unfurls its flowers and fruit. Accompanying this vigorous composition, the muted palette, where green coexists with pink, is resolutely joyful, envisioning the first blush of spring. While the passion flower is a plant drawn to the sun, the clump of ferns at its foot anchors it in the undergrowth, creating a contrast between light and shadow.
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