A cultivated person is someone interested in art. And what about art itself? Can it be cultivated? There can be no questioning that art often appears in pieces of wasteland, like weeds, growing in the cracks, between other fields of knowledge. But the seed must be scattered, blown into flight, until germinating into a new plot of land, so that everyone perceives it. It does not suffice for only the expert, the gardener, to know that there are dormant seeds in a piece of land; we have to see the shoots. When they emerge, we'll be in Florescentism, André Feliciano envisions. “Just as a tomato plantation is cultivated, the nature of art is being cultivated”, the art gardener asserts. Whereas in the tomato plantation the whole process of preparing the land for the plant's growth takes 3 months, in art, says the artist, it takes 3 centuries. “Today, the seed of the nature of art has already been planted, but the plant has not yet blossomed. We don't know what the fruit will be, or when it will come.
When Florescentism arrives, which in André Feliciano’s theory, is a kind of graft between spring and renaissance, a mixture between the times of nature and of art history, art will no longer be intelligible only to the cultivated and the cultivators; it will be alive and a part of everyone’s lives. The ill-fitting term “contemporary art” will give way to a more specific name, and “florescentic art” is one suggestion.
For the time being, Gardener André Feliciano invests in test-tube art, or, more precisely, seedbed art. And the buds in André Feliciano's pre-Florescentist greenhouse have brought flowers in the form of cameras, pollinated by photography. This camera-flower, like every work of art, is not simply looked at, but it also looks at and registers us. In the words of the artist, “photography is generally related to death (Roland Barthes), because it’s an image that defines a moment that will never return, it’s an image that shows a moment that has ‘died’. So, I cultivate a life for photography, creating relations of another order with photography... like the idea that the flower can photograph us without necessarily making a picture, but rather a more alive and poetic photographic relation.”
In pre-Florescentism, living photography might be a sign of adaptation or mutation of art. But it the flower or fruit to come from Florescentist art remains unknown. Any attempt to guess what will come is mere prophecy; as long as time does not bring its avocado pear, by dawn it's a tomato, by dusk a papaya.