Hogar, La vida Breve |
Home, The Briefly life
2015

The still life appeared in painting first and in photography much later. As a genre it is a synthesis of our relationship with nature, as consumers or predators. Whether it was dead animals arranged next to the instruments of their execution (shotguns, bayonets and ammunition), or through lustrous fruit or seductive flowers, still lifes flaunted our mastery of nature.

As a genre, still life merely represented an order of the world that we knew to be safe and rational. With the brilliance of oil paint or the magic of the darkroom, the genre gave plastic form to categories that had rendered the order of the world rational and comprehensible. The things we could eat, kill or contemplate. Surrounded by the golden frame of culture, that order seemed luminous and immutable. Today we know that this was an illusion. Our balance is precarious and every sign of chaos, from pollution to irrational ethnic violence, seems to tell us that our order is artificial and deceptive. An explanation to take us away from the fear of the uncertain.