After David Hockney's Apple Blossoms, here are Cherry Blossoms, Damien Hirst's exceptional new series of paintings exhibited at the Fondation Cartier. "The Cherry Blossoms are about beauty, life and death. They are excessive - almost vulgar," explains the artist. Cherry Blossoms is Damien Hirst's first institutional exhibition in France. The Cherry Blossoms series reinterprets the traditional and popular subject of floral representation with joyful irony. On the canvas, Damien Hirst mixes thick strokes and splashes of paint, referring to impressionism, pointillism and action painting. The monumental canvases, entirely covered by bright and saturated colours, envelop the viewer in a vast vegetal landscape oscillating between figuration and abstraction. The Cherry Blossoms are both a diversion and a tribute to the great artistic movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. They are part of the pictorial reflections that Damien Hirst has always had.