Coined in the context of the incipient modern society to which industrialization gave rise in nineteenth-century Paris, the term “flâneur” raised the status of aspirational good for those who renounced material comfort by pursuing their artistic and literary dreams.

The poet Charles Baudelaire mentions for the first time the art of wandering in his book Flowers of Evil. In it, he describes an aimless walker with no target in the cities, except the mere fact of walking. Naughty and indolent character, perhaps more related to perplex dandism, the nineteenth-century flâneur finds stimulating to appreciate the most irrelevant details.

“To the perfect flâneur, for the passionate watcher, it is an immense joy to establish its home in the hearts of the crowd, between the flux and reflux of movement, in the middle of the fugitive and infinite. Being away from home, and still feeling at home anywhere, contemplate the world, be in the center of it, and yet go by unnoticed – such are the tiny pleasures of those independent, passionate, incorruptible spirits, that the language can barely attempt to define.”

Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal, 1857.

This way, just like the lover of universal life penetrates in the crowd like a cumulus of electric energy, Flânerie -GALERIA AZUR MADRID’S new exhibition- introduces us hedonistically to an accumulation of detail, nuances, and sutil contrasts that override the confusing complexity of the real, incarnated into the work of art.

The selection of artworks composing this artistic proposal derives from the juxtaposition of temporal and stylistic strata: paintings, objects, and photography (among others) are offered to capture our attention, to take us away from the old art of “wandering” from one artwork to another,  to attend the random detail and nuance of the moment, while the torrent of crossed perceptions challenges us, arouses curiosity and frayed thought.

That is why Flânerie is the synthesis of the very emergentist nature of consciousness, it’s the need to evoke and comprehend reality from different points of view.

Artworks