Supernature

Safia Hijos invites us to enter into a singular stoneware « Winter Garden » : cascades and bunches of foliage on the walls, « Tulip Trees » garnished with natural flowers placed on a base. Does Safia Hijos have a craze for the plants to decorate our living rooms ?

The taste for indoor green plants has been essentially introduced in the coursed of the 19^th century, during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, the development of the greenhouse architecture and the improving heating techniques. Inside the Salon Bourgeois, the exotic indoor plant has lost its functional qualities and joins the decorative objects as an expression of the social status and the self. It is the dreamy era of eclecticism, a time when the new society was filled with dreams (Gothic, Chinese, Persian, and Renaissance). It is a time when the look lost itself in the glimmering of the mirrors and the psyches, where gas was shining in the globes that were similar to opalescent moons.

Each of us only dreams of a sudden joy. Is Safia Hijos inviting us to look back at the enigma from the inside, space of our existential experiences, to decode the contours of the soul more than the contours of the things ? The ceramist covered those greenery Falls and flowered tulip trees with enamels, overlaid with lead (toxic when applied), that yet decorate the stoneware with matchless green and yellow varnished colors. Taking a closer look at it, there is overall something excessive, in the complication of the shapes and the declension of the olive-green/emerald tones that forces the taste and jeopardizes it. A kind of worried euphoria. To what feast or primitive scene is Safia inviting us ? To the union of the mineral, the bodies and the vegetal, three states of the world, three forms of being that can be measured, have an end, that yet elude all measurements and all ends.