Throughout Victoria Cantons’ artistic career, the rose has been an important and ever present symbol. For Cantons, the rose represents a wide range of powerful motifs: it conveys ideas about ephemerality, beauty, decay, time and life. Cantons’ use of the rose situates her works in the genre of vanitas - these pieces remind the viewer of their own mortality.

In Untitled (A whisper of some beautiful secret that you remember from life) [Breaths I- XII] depicts red roses, traditionally a symbol of true love, and transforms them to become a reflection on the function of language and writing. Here, Cantons takes inspiration from Willem De Kooning as she considers the relationship between the rhythm and tempo of mark making and the visual balance of the work. Throughout the piece, roses are drawn with a rapid, gestural intensity that has the effect of leading the viewer’s eye at varying different speeds and rhythms. Much like a person’s handwriting, Cantons’ mark making is distinctly her own - the energy and feeling of the artist in the moment of creation is expressed directly in the lines.

The painting, which is made up of twelve individually labeled ‘Breaths,’ takes inspiration from American poet and writer Joshua Rivkin who says “As the body sinks, breath breaks the surface, “amorous” and lingering. The breath that rises is momentary, the bubbles breaking the surface will disappear. The breath will stop. The lovers die again and again. What lasts is language. Not the image or the pale sweep of white, not a painting, but a poem. This is the afterlife. Handwriting, borrowed words, a disappearance. Not a shout for help but a bubble of breath.”