Still Life: Connections to The Body

Maciej Urbanek The Elders, 2012

Marciej Urbanek’s piece The Elders, 2012 is a beautifully dark and textured image of forgotten lemons and tangerine that the artist discovered in their studio. It straight away reminds me of typical still life paintings of arranged fruit on tables by its composition, lighting hitting the fruit to highlight the texture and detail of its skin and specific colour palette consisting of black, orange, yellow, white, and green which shows aging and time passing.

Urbanek, was reminded of portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals, of old men and women, he noticed the texture and appearance of the fruits skin was like that of aging skin on humans and hinting to the decay hidden from view in both the fruit and us.

In his book, ‘Nature Morte: Contemporary artists reinvigorate the Still Life tradition’ Micheal Petry describes the work as “once ripe fruit now despoiled” (Petry, 2016:98)

“The fruit becomes stand-ins for the body, the substitute that evokes the qualities and characteristics of the old flesh – hardened, shrivelled, dry and porous” (Urbanek in Petry, 2016:98)

The image below is from Petry's book as I am unable to find Urbanek's image online currently.

Fig 1: Urbanek, Maciej. “The Elders, 2012,” Nature Morte : Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition, 2016.

Upon first viewing the image, I was drawn to the darkness and colours within the fruit and saw it as a simple still life image of fruit, but reading the description by Petry in his book, I instantly understood the inspiration and influence Urbanek noticed and the similarities between those unnoticed elements that I am showing within my own work, and I look upon the image in a different way, I now see the resemblance between the lemon skin and human skin, the textures, shadows, structures and aging. Those visual observations linking these to our own bodies is making the view (me) think about my own skin, how it is changing as I age, its textures and as something that we cannot control and do not noticed.

“We are part of nature; its sequences apply to us as much as they do to plants” (De Botton and Armstrong, 2016:141)

References:

Books:

Alain De Botton, and John Armstrong. Art as Therapy. London, Phaidon Press Limited, 2016, p. 40.

Petry, Michael. Nature Morte : Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition. London Thames And Hudson, 2016.

Images:

Urbanek, Maciej. “The Elders, 2012,” Nature Morte : Contemporary Artists Reinvigorate the Still-Life Tradition, 2016.

Figures:

Fig 1: Maciej Urbanek, 2012, The Elders