Les fleurs secrètes d’Alfred Latour

Les fleurs secrètes d’Alfred Latour

Echoing the dazzling lapping of Lausanne Jardins 2024

To mark the 7th edition of Lausanne Jardins, a life-size
 laboratory for urban development, the Alfred Latour Foundation has joined forces with Lausanne’s flagship summer event to present the exhibition Les fleurs secrètes d’Alfred Latour (Alfred Latour’s Secret Flowers).

Two themes that intersect and respond to each other: water along the banks of the lake and the flower captured by the painter in the heart of the Alpilles, presented after the long ascent of the Rhône, practically on the hidden course of the Flon, a little above  the former address of the Bains Haldimand, Place du Nord 2. A drop of water like a dream and a journey through time. A dialogue about life and fragility, approached on the one hand by the art of transforming space, and on the other by the art of representing the fleeting beauty of plants. On the one hand the flower surprised by the pencil or watercolour, on the other the space transformed to make room for a new way of looking at things.

The Espace Alfred Latour extends the theme of ‘point of view’ and ‘aesthetics’, opening its doors to dialogue between the arts.

Les fleurs secrètes d’Alfred Latour

It is said that flowers are God’s palette of colours, that they symbolise life and the passage of time, that they have their own language that speaks to the lover or the friend too soon gone. Since the dawn of time, painters have been capturing the motif, showing us their plant paradise. They strive to capture the sublime. Herbariums abound, the images escort us and live in us forever – Hosannah Maria Sibylla Merian, with the blue lily and the marvellous caterpillar.

Alfred Latour takes hold of the subject, sketching out the sparkles of his paradise. His pencil and brush went to the essentials, synthesising what was available to the eye: the red, the subtle ivory of the fruit blossom, the pink, the luxuriance of dark purples. His strokes reflect the purity of the period – the mid-twentieth century – and the need for simplified form, echoing the great gestures of the UAM. And repetition creates the garden that spreads out before our eyes. Twenty times the golden ear of rye, to show the long furrows swaying in the wind; twenty times the peony, to recall the deep patches in the green meadow; twenty times the rose climbing the wall, to evoke subtle perfumes, and the fig leaf for the shadow, the shadow that structures the light.

The techniques used are varied: watercolour, graphite, charcoal, engraving, collage and, occasionally, the elegant suppleness of fabric.

For the first time, at Lausanne Jardins 24, sixty years after the death of the artist from Eygalières, Alfred Latour’s secret herbarium is on show. It has all the hallmarks of this universal subject: an original line, a chosen point of view, a seductive, intimate relationship with the unique flower, the fragile, the patina of the passing of time.

Espace Alfred Latour
Place du Nord 2
1005 Lausanne