CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/17/2022

Tapping into the joy of Cherry Blossom season

Featured spreads are from Damien Hirst: Cherry Blossoms, a book that is gorgeous and compelling on its own, but especially inspiring this week, as cherry trees come to life up and down the east coast. “Branches sprawl and spread all around, as if to entirely cover the surface of the painting, down to the smallest bit of space,” Emanuele Coccia writes. “A metamorphosis of sorts has modified their original purpose. No longer do they trace the modular architecture enabling a fair and balanced distribution of foliage, flowers and fruit. The brown lines now crisscross the canvas like the bones and sinews of some flying beast, magnetizing the most motley shapes and hues so as to aggregate, couple, support and prevent them from falling, from disappearing into the sky, into the background. Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossoms series reads as an alternative treatise on botany: brought into the artist’s pictorial realm, Prunus serrulate—the cherry tree species from Asia that many actually worship, its blossoming prompting an array of social rites—seems to take on a novel shape and lead a different life, its silhouette still shooting up but as if altered. Such a metamorphosis, however, does not result from an arbitrary decision. It follows the rigorous and logical approach that Damien Hirst has fostered in his work since the beginning, while also taking into account the demands living beings impose on the world and its very matter whenever they need to transform these into simple images.”