Didier Lhonorey

« I have always loved the desert.
One sits down on a desert sand dune,
sees nothing, hears nothing.
Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams …»
Antoine DE SAINT-EXUPERY, The Little Prince.

Selfie Flowers. Using brown ink Didier L’Honorey portrays a basic flower: four petals, a stem and a pot. The image fills the white paper in a frontal arrangement, always reproduced in the same rectangular vertical format of 65 x 50 cm.
Drawn, coloured in or sprayed in generous calligraphic movements, L’Honorey’s flowers do not refer to anything real; they do not represent any specific floral variety. They are born out of the artist’s imagination and his graphic exercises; each new flower emanates from the previous one. With his one hundred and fifty drawings Didier L’Honorey defies the rules of creation, as he repeatedly develops a single motif on one support, in one medium, thereby achieving the obviously simple. Varying his flower in a myriad of different attitudes: feminine, victorious, rebellious, voluptuous or radiant, invasive, cheeky or seductive, authoritarian, minimalist or abstract, menacing, nervous, humble or coquette, timid, discrete, or complex, bending over, curled up, square, round, fragile, poetic, depressive or funny … Didier L’Honorey conveys – subtly and casually – the act of painting with feeling.
In the end, the whole forms an astonishing gallery of one hundred and fifty selfies, in which each flower appears alone, autonomous, singular, different. In the early stages of his career, L’Honorey painted faces using the icon method, faces with no reference to anyone specific and yet very different from one another.