Adrien Missika

The aluminium framed halfway-gold-mirrored-windows have been recovered by Missika from an emblematic 1960s office building in Geneva Switzerland. The reclaimed windows are printed with botanical motifs showing blown out cropped tropical leaves, partly rotten or time damaged. The making of these images plays an important role in the processual quality of the work: they are made using a portable book scanner, also called «magic wand», a small device used for scanning magazine pages or cashier receipts. Missika takes it along when hiking in the jungle and scans the plants on location, on the tree itself, inverting the process of objects coming on a flatbed scanner. This process implies that it takes him time to acquire each image, it involves a somewhat unstable and shaky gesture which generates imperfections that are later visible on the print. The process is somehow a performative gesture, like ironing leaves – the title frottage borrows Max Ernst’ frottage technique as a reference.

As for the plants here shown, Adrien Missika built on Burle Marx, who, sensitive to the temporal and ephemeral nature of architecture and civilizations, readily recycled archi- tectural elements for his creations: by choosing native plants only, mostly some common species of ferns in the Ile-de-France, Missika prints summon the more or less utopian concepts of vertical gardens and green cities.