Flowering Buenos Aires

Charles Thays was a dreamer who imagined a colour palette for the city of Buenos Aires.
He planted all over the avenues, boulevards and parks marvellous trees and gardens. All
the grace of these trees and its flowers had shared their beauty with us for more than a
century.
I had visit the trees and the flowers every year. I looked at them, and they look at me. I
pick up every petal, lilys, yellow and pink to adorn my table.
I became a seasonal artiste. It’s impossible for me to avoid the crunching leaves during
the autumn. Or the iridescent emerald of spring. Or the abandonment of the branches
in winter.
The summer fragrant festivity full fills me with green colours.
This are my colours for every month over the year:

I represent them with few suggestions. Floating in the air of the paper, under luminous
skies. With intensity and showing just a delicate fragment. Their presence doesn’t show
the huge effort this plants develop over and over every year. Season by season.
I will like to express some gratitude; to Maurice Maeterlinck and his knowledge of the
flowers intelligence. Juan L. Ortiz this poetise from Entre Rios who guide me within the
nature observation. And Charles Thays who puts in my way this trees.
May 2001, Buenos Aires.

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Charles Jules Thays

I like to imagine the architect Charles Thays walking with the muses. They whisper in his
ear about the kindness of the trees, the music of the leaves and the healing perfumes.
Charles Thays is the founder of the Botanic Garden of Buenos Aires. He was a scientist.
But for me he was poet over all, he was one of those who can awaken dreams and
explore the beauty of splendour.
Juan Jacobo Rousseau said: “trees, bushes and plants are the earth clothing”. Thays
knew deeply about ancient gardens.
In order to intensify the beauty of this landscape, Charles Thays use what this lands own
and strew it. Native jewels are display, together with the ones coming from far away, in
a gorgeous vegetal fraternity gathered in their nowadays home, The Botanic Garden,
with an astonishing beauty.
With profound love and care, the same he dispose for the gardens, he create a family
who will became the guardian of landscape.
Charles Thays reminds me to a Taoist whenever he talked about trees: “the spirit lays,
sadness is forgotten, for a moment at least; and the aspect of beauty and pure,
produces an immediate effect in our hearts…”
The most extraordinary things in our lives comes with simplicity. I can imagine Thays,
taking the necessary care of the smallest and each plant. Almost without aiming it, he
achieve the working for the greatness.
The Botanic Garden is where nature remains complete. Where a dew drop can reflect
the harmony of the universe. Towards this garden the ancient Greeks use to walk, near
the sea. And where the Taoists silently gathered together. Rousseau himself had had
probably, like the philosophes of nature, searched in the most humble petals of the
most humble flowers, a faraway shimmer from a star.
In front of the drinking iris, as a breeze touch them softly; I am thinking what if men
anywhere are philosophes and poetise captivating the mysteries that nature doesn´t
share easily.
Thays involved us in an ephemeral and everlasting beauty. My painted flowers are the
ones he has already see, and the ones dancing with the music of our time.
Spring of 2006, Buenos Aires.

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I saw Flowers…

I saw flowers, as they languish under the sun, as they became into the silk of the
landscape itself, joined together by the tones of branches, leaves and dark trunks.
And others, within the green, like a velvet tapestry, fragrant with unknown perfumes.
I saw the intense and brief ones, biting the morning and the afternoon, and also
sleepless in the night.
I saw the tender ones, who can partially float; and who also are joyful and musical. The
song of free children.

    This series ends up here, I had called them the atmospherics.

   In the Oriental,series, the flowers are presented like symbols of Japanese ink. So thick,
so black that it turns into blue. And becomes the night until the colour disturb them,
becoming savage and unrestricted.

I saw flowers…
Flowers who are visited by bees that deepen the love in the corollas. And who comes
and goes with their precious luggage to the hive.
And the most perfumed and sweetened honey; the opalescent beeswax… they are
themselves in the most antique song to life, humble and autonomous.
This way, after their passage through the beeswax, flowers had become opulent. Bees
had join them with a message of profound love and hopeful dedication.

This was my last series of flowers, intervened with beeswax, and bees.

Summer, 2012.