CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/27/2022

In 'Botanical: Observing Beauty,' the core of perception

Ahh, plants! Featured spreads are from Botanical: Observing Beauty, the beyond-beautiful, 336-page compendium collecting botanical drawings and prints, scientific illustrations, photographs, images of jewelry, video games and more by the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint-Laurent, to name just a few. "It is precisely the impossibility of eliminating or translating, of sublimating their bodies, or sentient life, that defines that the way of accessing plants can only be aesthetic," Emanuele Coccia writes. "And, vice versa, any form of aesthetic representation or manipulation of the living being becomes a form of scientific knowledge. It is as if plants had forced humanity to relate to them as one relates to a jewel, a drawing, a painting—to a core of perception that asks to be reproduced in sensation and memory, that asks to extend and multiply gazes infinitely."