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Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern’s “Lady Slipper Foulard” is part of her “The Florilegium” exhibition at The Watchung Arts Center.
Science tells us that so-called “perfect” flowers are hermaphroditic: their buds open to show male and female sexual organs. They aren’t bashful about it. You don’t need to be Georgia O’Keeffe to look at a flower — its gauzy petals, its pollen-rich stamen, its central pistil — and get ideas. Plants are shameless. They’re right out there, waving their component parts in the breeze, wide open about things that we timid humans cover up.
Artists have always taken advantage of this audacity. Plant motifs hint at things that people in polite society are hesitant to say. In the Victorian Era, a secret alphabet of floral symbols blossomed in the shadows. Floriography conveyed silent messages from lover to lover and from artist to audience.
That is exactly the sort of historical puzzle that captures the intellectual attention of Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern, a New Jersey multimedia artist with a sense of humor, a taste for sociopolitical provocation — and a fondness for flowers, codes and bright, unashamed color. “The Florilegium,” a show that will hang at The Watchung Arts Center through Oct. 25, is both scrupulously researched and delightfully reckless. It is a wry, flirty, symbol-rich installation of ink pieces, watercolors, and oils on paper and canvas. P.E. Pinkman’s smart curation gives the artist latitude to comment on desire, the beauty of the horticultural world, and the alternately thorny and harmonious nature of male-female relationships.
The show is also an excuse for Ficarelli-Halpern to depict her favorite flowers. She has a good eye for the polite gestures of tulips and the rounded thumbnail arcs of their petals. She directs the spade-points of succulent leaves in all directions. But her true love is orchids. She is attuned to their weight, their wildness, their uncommon beauty, and their alien shape. Orchids seem unreal: flowers that have sprung from the untilled soil of our unconscious. Ficarelli-Halpern treats each orchid she paints as if it is an individual with its own personality and disposition. Though no humans are represented in “The Florilegium,” stepping into the gallery feels like walking into a portrait hall filled with paintings of stern, distant ancestors. (And in an evolutionary sense, that is not that far from the truth.)
Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern’s “Queen of Flowers.”
Each of these floral characters has its own predicament, too, and its own relationship to the other blooms in the Ficarelli-Halpern hothouse. The “Queen of Flowers,” a trio of white-hooded orchids on a green stalk that looks somewhat over-watered, droops at its neighbors with regal disdain. It shares a wall with the “Wild Species,” a roguish customer with blade-like petals, a serpentine shaft, and leaves that curl inward like they are protecting a secret. In between the two is the “Deceptor,” a bearded, ferocious-looking beast of a bloom with a bright blue landing space for insects and two curved appendages that resemble fangs. The bees that surround the flower seem nervous, flittering on the edge of its bite path, surveying the area for a place to land. Is this orchid about to slam shut on an unlucky bug? Might it also lash out at us?
Ficarelli-Halpern amplifies the intensity of her art by applying oil paint directly to paper. The result is vibrant, high-contrast, detailed likenesses of orchids, with everything unrelated to the garden drama excised. Even the sky, a muted gradient running from creamy white at ground level to pale blue at the top, seems accidental. Cleverly, each of these flower portraits is set in a paper border — a line-drawn, black-and-white version of an ornate 19th century frame. The nod to antique floral folios imparts a little grandeur to the show without sapping it of the storytelling immediacy that makes it work. Sometimes that immediacy and symbolic detail seems so heavy-handed that you wonder if the artist is pulling our legs. Could the “Deceptor” plant really have a pair of testicle-like spheres dangling over its root?
As it turns out, it does. That is just the way that particular orchid hangs. Ficarelli-Halpern doesn’t have to exaggerate: The flowers do her salacious business for her. She has researched all of these plants meticulously, and recorded much of what she has found in her voluminous, playful, sharply written notes. She provides us with exact botanical names for her subjects, and tacitly encourages us to check her work.
Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern’s “Hydrangea Corsage.”
When she commits her images to canvas rather than paper, her studiousness is unmistakable. Only somebody who has spent hours staring at blossoms could capture the way in which flower petals absorb light and the soft, feathery, dewy texture of the bud as it opens to greet the morning. “Hydrangea Corsage,” a close-up, piles flower atop flower, fold upon fold, cup within cup, with everything pink, fleshy and pliable. It is as suggestive of female genitalia as the “Deceptor” is of male physiology.
Corsages are designed to adorn a woman’s body. When cut and arranged to be part of an ensemble, flowers become living accessories. But even when they are tamed, there is always something wild and undisciplined about them. They suggest that no matter how civilized and buttoned-down their wearer seems to be, deep down, she belongs to nature. Primal forces are stirring within her. She could access them if she liked.
Ficarelli-Halpern dances on the borderline between the organic and the sartorial in a series of lively gouache-and-ink pieces that explore the connections between flowers and clothing. The Lady Slipper orchid — which really does resemble a fashionable shoe — inspires an arrangement of vintage French footwear attached to leaves and surrounded by a border of golden vines. So colorful and delicate are these images that it might take you a moment to remember that shoes don’t grow on trees.
Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern’s “A Little Plant Adultery.”
“Lady Slipper” is one of the central panels in a series of watercolors and gouaches on the north wall of the gallery that Ficarelli-Halpern has tethered together with a white ribbon. They include several panels that allude to the shattering of sexual repression and the restrictive quality of women’s clothing. In one, a pink flower with six splayed petals explodes suggestively from a stuffy manor bed. In another, a colorful bouquet peeks over the top of a fiercely cinched grey corset. Most overt is a tribute in yellow and black to Collinsonia Canadensis, a most unruly flowering herb noted for its promiscuity. Tendrils from a shameless pistil reach in all directions and mingle with the drooping fronds of neighboring plants. It’s a three-way or a more-way, depending on how you count it, and the main character seems delighted right down to her spreading root-system. With a wink and no small amount of excitement, Ficarelli-Halpern has dubbed it “A Little Plant Adultery.”
Naturally, this is all arch and knowing in a way that the artist’s Victorian forebears could never have been. In 2025, Ficarelli-Halpern doesn’t have to use floriography to get her message across. Yet her choice to dwell in this world never seems the least bit anachronistic. She has caught the 19th century vibe. She understands the wit, the curiosity and the coquetry; she feels the thrill of botanical discovery; and she knows the significance of petals on the wind.
She doesn’t merely love flowers: She admires them, too. Maybe she even looks up to them. In piece after playful piece, she dares us to be as bold as they are.
“The Florilegium” will be at Watchung Arts Center through Oct. 25; visit watchungarts.org.
For more on Lisa Ficarelli-Halpern, visi lisaficarelli-halpern.com.
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