On view until June 28
In Bloom brings together paintings and sculptures by Jesse Pollock, Guy Rubicon, and Julien Jaca at Gallery Hioco Delany, three artists who share the conviction that nature does not stay silent. It speaks. Of social loss, of resistance, of what we would rather forget. The title is borrowed from Nirvana’s 1991 song of the same name, a song about someone who sees only the beautiful surface but misses the deeper meaning. Starting from the tension between superficial beauty and the stories that plants, animals, and landscapes truly carry within them, each artist explores in their own way what role the artist plays in developing ecological sensitivity, and how the non-human can serve as a witness to history and trauma.
British artist Jesse Pollock begins with a concrete botanical observation: the blackthorn, one of the first flowers to appear in the English spring along hedgerows and waterways. Inspired by Edward Thomas’ book In Pursuit of Spring, where the author, in 1913, cycled towards the season to document the arrival of spring, what the Industrial Revolution had displaced, and a quiet, passing world, Pollock lives within that same ongoing reality of loss. His studio is in a boatyard; he studies what still grows in his immediate surroundings and casts it in recycled aluminium: an industrial material, but also one of the most abundant metals in the earth’s crust. The roughness of the cast metal stands in tension with the delicacy of the flower it preserves, as if he is fossilising it before it disappears.
Guy Rubicon works intuitively, without a predetermined plan. His colourful paintings, organic fields of orange, green, red, and black flowing into one another, resist easy interpretation. Forms suggest landscapes, trees, and figures, but refuse any definitive reading. This is no coincidence. Rubicon works from a philosophical conviction he shares with Carl Jung: nature is not merely matter; it is also spirit. The human being does not stand outside it but is an inseparable part of it. In his paintings, this is literally visible: no separation between figure and environment, but everything as one moving, breathing mass.
French artist Julien Jaca draws from a specific historical soil: the counterculture of the 1970s, in which resistance to society and a return to nature were inseparably bound. Biker culture sought freedom in rugged landscapes beyond the ordered world. Primitive art was rediscovered as a counterweight to industrial modernism. Metal grew out of that same industrial landscape but turned against it. These are not loose influences but a shared attitude: the refusal to consume nature. In his paintings, broad fields of colour allow hidden images to surface. Nature dormant beneath the surface, pressing through to those who look long enough.
What unites the three artists is a shared punk aesthetic towards nature. Like philosopher Timothy Morton, whose concept of dark ecology argues that nature is not beautiful and harmonious but strange, uncomfortable, and untameable, they refuse to reduce nature to a backdrop. In Bloom is not an ode to a tamed nature. It is a recognition that nature has its own agency, its own voice: nature as witness, as political subject.
Text by Isabel Van Bos
