CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/18/2021

Behold Fondation Cartier’s gorgeous new Luiz Zerbini monograph, ‘Botanica’

Featured spreads are from Luiz Zerbini: Botanica, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s eye-poppingly deluxe 10x15-inch new release collecting Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini’s exquisite botanical monotypes made by placing leaves, flowers and branches directly on inked metal plates. “Luiz Zerbini literally transfers art to the garden,” Emanuele Coccia writes. “It is no longer a question of thinking of art as a form of interspecific bovarysm; it is a question of allowing other species to practice art in the same way that human beings practice it. What was, in the past, the human study of nature and the appearance of plants—botany—becomes, thanks to this series, the ambit in which plants constantly invent and reinvent their way of appearing. Rather than being reduced to the discipline of classifying plants according to the forms they impose on their bodies, in Zerbini’s hands botany is transformed into a parade of their projections and ‘impressions.’ The book you hold in your hand is but a seismograph of their hidden dreams, the secret diary of what they would like to be, and which they never had the courage to confess.”