Leonor Fini
Florian Mermin
with photographs by Lee Miller
On 26 July 1939, Leonor Fini visited the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval. Following her signature in the famous Livre d’Or du Facteur Cheval and through the moving testimony of a postcard of the Palais Idéal, which she briefly signed with ‘affectionate memories’ to Paul and Nusch Eluard (who had visited two years earlier with Picasso and Dora Maar), the intimate connection between the Ideal Palace and the artistic avant-garde on the eve of the Second World War is revealed.
Leonor Fini’s visit to the Palais Idéal was the first stop on a summer tour that would take her to Ardèche to visit Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, where she would also meet Lee Miller, and then to the Atlantic coast to visit Gala and Salvador Dalí.
Radically daring, Leonor Fini’s work transcends the century with fierce freedom. Ambivalent female representations, flamboyant sphinxes, metamorphic beings and theatrical scenes populate an imaginary world where beauty flirts with unease. Paintings, drawings and tapestries evoke secret narratives in which the power of the body, desire and metamorphosis unfold. The Ideal Palace becomes the perfect setting for these rebellious visions, between chiaroscuro and ritualistic light.
The exhibition Le Sphinx et la Rose pays tribute to the marvellous and flamboyant world of Leonor Fini, which unfolded every summer for nearly 25 years, on 30 August – her birthday – during lavish balls that she imagined by candlelight.
Florian Mermin visited the Palais Idéal for the first time in 2019, on his birthday. In perfect harmony with Postman Cheval’s monument, Florian Mermin presents a collection of works conceived as relics or fragments of a mysterious ritual, but also as an olfactory reflection on the scent of roses, a key element in the exhibition’s title.
In the exhibition, the rose becomes as much a painting as it is a scent. It is both an ornament and a sculptural motif. Inspired by the worlds of Cocteau and Poe, and combining the worlds of Leonor Fini and Ferdinand Cheval, Florian Mermin has created a unique sculpture: a large perfume bottle adorned with butterflies. Enhanced with rose thorns along its entire length, it rests on sphinx legs.
By invoking the sense of smell, the artist extends the sensory experience beyond sight and brings forth memories, intuitions and invisible presences. The scent of roses wafts from candles – specially produced by the artist – held by four candlestick sconces. Their striking design is reminiscent not only of the construction of the Ideal Palace by candlelight, but also of Leonor Fini’s exuberant evenings in Nonza, Corsica, in a ruined former Franciscan convent where she spent every summer for more than 20 years.
Through visual and symbolic dialogue, the exhibition explores what remains of mystery, ritual and wonder in art, from the 20th century to the present day. An extraordinary place of creation, born from the imagination of a single man, the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval is the setting for artistic metamorphoses. It welcomes two artists who might seem to have nothing in common—a different era, a different medium, a different history—but who come together in a spectacular exhibition that explores the margins, shakes up the thresholds, and blurs the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the human and the non-human, the living and the inanimate.
At the end of the exhibition, Le Sphinx et la Rose, Florian Mermin will design a second part – this time as a solo exhibition – which will be on display until 11 November 2025.
