8 Billion Flowers
Baró Galeria
Tiago Tebet
March - May 2025
There is a plant on my balcony that only blooms once a year. It does so fleetingly, on a summer night. Its flowers, white, large, and with ragged petals, seem like beings from another world. They change quickly as the hours pass. By the next morning, I find what’s left of them on the sidewalk or the street, where they fall after detaching from the plant. Sometimes, when I’m busy, I miss this event entirely and only see their remains scattered on the ground. I look up, realizing what I have missed for not paying attention to my surroundings, for rushing from one place to another. Unnoticed beauty has something tragic...
Flowers are deeply connected to universal themes such as the passage of time, death, sexuality, or the cosmos. In their apparent simplicity, they bear countless meanings. For instance, Mirra Alfassa, known as The Mother, used flowers as a medium of spiritual communication with her students and disciples. To help decipher these messages, she worked on a book titled Flowers and Their Messages, published shortly after her death in 1973. This book compiles her teachings about the spiritual symbolism of flowers at the Pondicherry ashram, exploring how flowers can act as vehicles of communication and reflect states of consciousness. It is the result of decades of work in which she systematically assigned spiritual meanings to more than 800 types of flowers:
"Each flower has its own individuality, its own attraction, its own charm, and each expresses a feeling, a special movement of the psyche. When you look deeply at a flower, you sense that what it expresses goes far beyond words."[1]
It is no surprise that Brazilian artist Tiago Tebet has taken a profound and complex approach to this subject, exploring flowers as a pictorial motif across different media and materials. His flowers also reveal their own individuality, but unlike the flower on my balcony that blooms and fades within a single day, Tebet's works allow us to freeze the moment and return to it again and again—encapsulating a petal within the materiality of painting.
In 8 Billion Flowers, his first solo exhibition in Mallorca, at Baró Galeria, Tebet presents a body of work that fills the space with textile and pictorial pieces. In the textile works, he tears, reconstructs, and reconfigures the canvas, experimenting with expanded painting that evokes abstract, vibrant, and textured flowers. The show also features small formats that explore the floral motif with a focus on texture and impasto, where the paint seems to gain volume and physical presence.
In the exhibition, we are greeted by multiplicity: reddish, white, and yellow flowers emerging from a dark landscape created with oil paint. One of them seems to escape from the upper corner of the canvas, as if seeking more space. But multiplicity is also connected to repetition. The series of poppies, obsessively painted by the artist from a photograph, raises questions about the destruction of a romantic motif through its reproduction. Each poppy is both the same and different at the same time, as if the possibility of difference filters through the act of repeating the same pictorial motif. Finally, the title of the exhibition refers to the idea of an event: both a flower that blooms and a person who lives are unique, unrepeatable moments. This parallelism also alludes to the world population, with its eight billion events.
As Alfassa wrote, "The movement of love is not limited to human beings and is perhaps less distorted in other realms. Observe the flowers and the trees."[2] Through this exercise of observation, Tiago Tebet reinterprets the language of flowers and the beauty of the unrepeatable, transforming their fragility into something lasting.
[1] Alfassa, Mirra. The Flowers and Their Messages. p. 19. Site of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother. Accessed March 13, 2025. https://sri-aurobindo.co.in.
[2] Op. cit., p. 11.