When the revolution in Nicaragua in the late 1970s ended the violent rule of the dictator Somoza by force, an icon that grew out of it went around the world: a pretty young woman presented her rifle with a white flower shining from its barrel. The painter Ellen Semen proclaims a similar revolution, a flower revolution. She also reacts to the violence that she encounters everywhere, although her gun is the brush and her ammunition is the paint.
A battle of symbols rages in many of her paintings. For example, soldiers - be they men, women or children - break through the homely carpets of flowers in full bloom. The soft and fluffy suddenly collide with the hard and bulky. Sometimes the pictures overrun their titles, when the heart on a flower shows a small child holding a flat hand grenade on the flat of its hand or when Peace
shows a boy with a pistol at the ready. The captions heighten the consternation that the pictures trigger.
In her analysis of the present, Ellen Semen mixes up the entire history, men with halos appear just as much as Greek heroes and figures from mythology, or contemporary heroes such as Superman. In the face of a mess of human bodies, he is called upon to help: "It can't go on, Superman must come!"
The longing for heroes seems to be the solution. To heroes before! A beauty holds up this slogan as a banner, a quote from Delacroix's personalized revolution, which proclaimed freedom, equality and fraternity back in the 19th century. In Personal Crisis, Semen adopts Kleist's advice: "What you think long enough loses all terror". Admittedly, she replaces thinking with painting, if that is not the same thing anyway.