Léon de Smet
Vase de Fleurs
circa 1916
A magnificent red consumes the canvas. A vast parade of people, fish and flowers, or whatever one makes them to be, jig and swim in the shallow fiery waters surging around the explosion of feather-like buds, each blooming so passionately out from the depths of the orange clay bowl. Cupping this, the fluted vase - blue and cool and ravishing - acts to silence the riot swelling around it. Like a pillar of power it tries not only to contain the erupting flowers, but to calm the surrounding sea threatening to weaken its flowers, to drown them. It wants to own its pride of purpose, to support its every stem; it wants to prove itself a vase unlike any other. Ripples ensue from the table itself, dark and textured like nutritious soil. Danger approaches, or at least the warning of war. Things begin to tremble. Too many forces have now pooled into the same field of expression. Soon the vase and its cradled jewel will become one with the enemy, both lost in one big wave of pushing and tugging and bragging, comparing whose red is the reddest and whose strength is the strongest. Haughty and immature, each will think less of the other, convinced that its supremacy of colour will reign in the end, over all. But which will meet its end first: the sheet of paper, the ephemeral flowers or the brittle ceramic?
