Braîches

In residency at the Villa Medici, IMF approaches the city of Rome through the practice of gathering and dyeing wild plants. Day and night, in the courtyard of the orange tree alley, large sheets are cooked, dyed with dyes extracted from plants found in Roman wastelands, brambles, eucalyptus, madder… The dyes are gradually mixed with reserves of beeswax and black streaks of iron, which cause the tannins to change colour.

The research is conducted in fits and starts, each new cooking process is a step in the development of a personal, empirical painting technique that gradually breaks free from convention. This painting on the motif, which records the landscape in its very material, is akin to experimental cartography: the fruit of daily explorations that take them from the gardens of the villa to the banks of the Tiber and the wastelands on the outskirts of the city, they sketch out a representation of the urban territory through the interstices, the vague spaces, where we can detect the traces of the silent struggle of living things grappling with the city.