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C/ Monistrol 21, 08012, Barcelona
hello@betacontemporary.com
+34 722 745 291
12.02.2026 - 03.03.2026
Carrer Monistrol 21, 08012 Barcelona
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In this exhibition, we enter a garden where the black lily takes centre stage. A garden encircling a river, barely held together by a fragile structure on the verge of collapse. The water moves slowly but with persistence, and in its course it exposes the vulnerability of its supports, the wear, the threshold of what still manages to remain standing.
Today, in this contaminated terrain, where fire slips through the furrows at first light, the black lily has become a solitary and ambiguous emblem of both resistance and fear.
Under the gardener’s care, each lily is enclosed within a canvas, conceived as a hortus conclusus in itself. “A garden for each flower” was the promise once read in a Sacred text, for only through the lily’s isolation can its allure be contained.
Held in this way, the flowers become apertures through which one may glimpse the abandoned garden without fully surrendering to its delirium. Like images that seal the dystopian dread of the world, these paintings also reflect the deeply human gesture of the florist. There is something tender, almost naïve, in the act of tending to a flower: the brevity of its life softens us; yet for that same reason, the excess of care becomes almost unbearable.
And it is precisely this unbearable excess that ultimately pushes the flower, nearly defenceless, toward surrender. A quiet delirium, fragile as the faintest tremor, begins to undo it from within, as though its own intensity were consuming it. The black of its petals unfolds into a silent landscape where only a distant, almost imagined glimmer remains. Its scent lingers, but its form becomes unrecognisable, as if it had relinquished all memory of itself.
Emmanuel Alvarez and Elena Rocabert