The blossoming of a flower [from the Latin florescĕre] is an imperceptible event that unfolds wrapped in the mystery of the everyday. An appearance that, among all of nature's grand and silent manifestations, synchronizes the perfect moment in which the bud is reborn from the dark winter to reveal itself, caught in the act, before the spring light.

To Beatriz Salvatierra, the exploration of the image has become a journey toward her own identity. Florescĕre reveals a little-explored territory, a way of searching inward to discover what also constitutes her. The flower then appears as both mirror and aim; a question and, at the same time, an answer, about the circularity of life, about what is most intimate and feminine, motherhood and its creative capacity.

With a stereoscopic gaze, she moves into the process by which the flower is woven, from the shape unveiled among greens and shadows to the secret threshold of its vulva. The closer she gets, the less recognizable its bud becomes. The petal ceases to be a petal, the fold becomes landscape, and the organic form begins to detach from its referent to reveal an abstraction made of lines, textures and transparencies. In this way, photography defines itself as a kind of sensitive anatomy, tracing what unfolds before her eyes.

Salvatierra's work recognizes the territory in order to draw it, frame by frame, as an almost abstract symbol of feeling. Along these lines, her work draws closer to a pictorial universe of artistic references such as the American Georgia O'Keeffe, Henri Laurens's "Femme fleur," Hessie's "Végétation," or the abstractions of Joan Miró; even — more distantly — Monet's water lilies or Gauguin's natural landscapes, which, in a deeply personal experience for the artist, intermingle with the poetry of Federico García Lorca and the cosmologies of the Taíno peoples of the Caribbean, who speak of feminine deities associated with motherhood and fertility.

These images are also a search for the woman behind life, bound to a singular power: to gestate and to nurture. That goddess who holds within herself nature's most unexplored mysteries. From the recognizable to the abstract, from the permanent to the ephemeral, Florescere builds a story told in three acts: Magnolia, which narrates blooming and the natural cycle; Memoria, which reveals the flower's inner forms; and Misterio, which unveils what can barely be seen.

Text by Lucía Jiménez Perozo