Flower Games

Cellar Contemporary, Trento Italy

Catalog Essay:

Despite its insistence on the inanimate, still life has never been a passive project. Throughout art history the genre has been mobilized in service of enlightenment and edification, as in Dutch vanitas paintings with their allegories of mortality and impermanence; or pictorial disruption, like the modern collapse of perspective presaged by a moment as fleeting as light shifting on the skin of an apple. At some point, artists across movements discovered that the still life, with its ostensible presentation of objectivity, was the ideal vessel through which to explore its very counterpart — the underlayer of reality, its glitches and raw edges. Hence the mystique of Giorgio Morandi, whose deceptively simple, off-kilter arrangements of ordinary objects on tabletops, with their hulky volumes and austere palette, betray the fictitious nature of perception.

Melissa Brown continues this tradition of harnessing still life to interrogate experience. Her paintings are manifestations of recollections that are once more doubled — “my impressions of memories,” she calls them. Moving back and forth between observation, reminiscence, and photographic documentation of place (most recently the northeastern Italian city of Trento, on the Adige River at the foothills of the Dolomites), Brown builds tableaux that are at once grounded in and removed from their subject matter.

In Flower Games, flowers chart the path from initial apprehension to pictorial representation. By the time Brown began painting the lilies in "Door to the Inner Chamber" (2024), the summer-loving perennials were on their way out, making way for the hydrangeas depicted elsewhere in the series. Wildflowers and alpine flora from Trento are interspersed with blooms that grow in her backyard, arranged in various ersatz vases. Then there is all that makes its way into Brown’s compositions as screen-printed photographs, another layer stacked. Cards, mirrors, and other fixtures of fate and fortune suggest a final sleight of hand.

In a world where most images are algorithmically determined, with so little left to chance, the slightest hint of the uncanny is interpreted as dreamlike. Standing before Brown’s works, however, we are witnessing not a reflection of a subconscious state but a splicing of multiple waking dimensions. She shares Morandi’s preoccupation with the metaphysical by way of Carrà and de Chirico, but her fixation is always with real phenomena. In “The Conversation,” slender stems of spotted foxgloves blossom delicately from a painted ceramic mug, flanked by a pair of antique sculptures, against a yellow vaulted ceiling. Each element was culled from life: The trumpet-like blooms were serendipitously sourced from an outdoor nursery in New Jersey, near her aunt's house; the cup, a classic specimen of Americana kitsch, is the artist’s own; and the bronze figures are among the items photographed by Brown during her visit to Trento’s Castello del Buonconsiglio last summer. A small rectangular window opens out to a gradient of sky, spun-candy blue, that reveals nothing about the time of day. Using Flashe vinyl paint on dibond, her signature method, allows Brown to achieve these junctures of storybook atemporality.  

It is no wonder that Brown found inspiration in the Buonconsiglio, itself a kind of collage. Erected in the 13th century and once the seat of the city's ruling prince-bishops, the castle was used as military barracks and repurposed into a jail before it was ultimately restored in the 1920s. Along the way, architectural features and stylistic shifts accrued to it like a coral reef, from its Medieval fortifications to its late Gothic and Renaissance frescoes. These many lives are captured in the castle museum’s sundry collection of functional objects, ornaments, maps, coins, and other artifacts, selections of which are reproduced in Brown’s paintings, such as an early 16th-century Muranese chalice in “Prince's Goblet" (2024). She imagines the ornate vessel overflowing with a bouquet of pale yellow roses, the same that line the castle’s gardens.

These “impossible still lifes,” in the artist’s words, are juxtaposed fragments of time that coalesce in her mind and in the composition. Segments of the past, present, future, and the atemporal domain of memory are selected, assembled, and laid down on the picture plane. The tarot, a recurring motif in Brown’s life and practice, emerges in her work as an acknowledgment that we exist only in the spaces between these realms. And so, the peaks of Mount Bondone peer out from a tangle of morning glories bursting with color, just plucked from her garden, unfolding like spinwheels from a flowerpot placed on top of a single card from the Minor Arcana — it’s the suit of swords, heady and intellectual, and though we can't quite make out the number, we’re reminded of destiny. 

Trento is often known as the “painted city” due to the wealth of mostly Renaissance-era interior and exterior frescoes that adorn its houses and historic landmarks like the Buonconsiglio castle. This must have been irresistible for an artist fascinated with the architecture of subjectivity — not how something is, but how it is seen to be. While the principal method of interfacing in our time is by mediating our own image, perpetually producing alternative versions of ourselves, Brown excels at imagining the multiplicities of others. She can suspend in her mind a hundred angles of the same vista. Friends and strangers go to her for advice. Perhaps that’s why, however improbable and constructed, the universes in her paintings don’t feel strained or unnatural — because she believes they are possible. 

Brown visited Trento in early summer 2024. The world has changed much since then, but soon the zinnias will bloom again. The castle stands unaltered, bathed in an inexplicable warmth, reflected upside-down in a glass sphere. The heavy doors, the painted halls, the shadows of the trees — it's just as she remembers it.

- Valentina Di Liscia, catalog essay, 2025