Fleur (VII – le sang du poète) – engraving and mixed media on c-print, 630 x 450 mm

Opium (2019-2020)
From shadow to light, from light to shadow.
Twenty-nine unique pieces

XXXIX – Spleen et idéal
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (1857)
Translation — Roy Campbell (Pantheon Books, 1952)

For you this poem: if my name should reach
Favoured by mighty gales, to far-off times,
Like a proud vessel sailing to the beach,
To stir the brains of humans with my rhymes —

Your memory, uncertain as a myth,
Will tire the reader like an endless gong,
And be a mystic, kindred chain wherewith
He’ll hang suspended to my towering song:

Curs’d soul to whom (from the supernal sky
To hell’s abysm) none responds but I!
O you, who like a fleeting shadow pass,

Spurn with light foot and with serenest gaze
The stupid mortals who have grudged you praise,
O jade-eyed statue, angel browed with brass!

Fleur (I – après le monde de z), 2019
mixed media on c-print
636 x 456 mm

Fleur (II – Phillis Wheatley), 2019
mixed media on c-print
636 x 452 mm

Fleur (III – In the Heat of the Night), 2019
mixed media on c-print
632 x 456 mm

Fleur (IV – Nuage), 2019
mixed media on c-print
634 x 454 mm

Fleur (VII – les ténèbres), 2019
mixed media on c-print
638 x 450 mm

Fleur (XI – de chair et d’or), 2019
mixed media on c-print
636 x 450 mm

Fleur (XII – un rose délavé), 2019
mixed media on c-print
638 x 450 mm

Fleur (IX – noire de sang), 2019
mixed media on c-print
638 x 452 mm

Fleur (XIV – hallucination), 2019
mixed media on c-print
718 x 505 mm