Freed from the concerns of the “higher” genres—the symbolic paraphernalia of power and its representation, and the reference to traditional religious values and collective life, still lifes unlike other figurative painting shimmer with the weak power of particularity. Apples, oranges, flowers, butterflies, tablecloth, shoes—the subject of such painting is concerned with the life of things, objects of use which when held back from the necessity of function now rest in the stupor of the void and reveal other senses: such as the host of associations that Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” which consists in the “unique manifestation of a distance”^[1]. However, still lifes (especially in late capitalism) can also expose the commodity fetish, depending on the kind of object being depicted, and the context in which it is found, the image as it were stewing in the manipulations of advertising and social desire.

What exactly is stillness, however? In Giorgio Morandi’s fabled studio still lifes carafes, blocks, glasses, and innumerable mundane objects just about lose their contours in light, i.e. Morandi’s subject is the sight of objects, not the objects themselves. And seeing becomes a fragile, tenuous affair in his paintings, which offer the shimmering of appearance itself. Stillness is not stasis then, but the reverberation that emerges from a phenomenon that has reconciled with the immanent rebellion of its parts against the integrity of the phenomenon itself^[2]. Only stillness may gather the whole that is internally heterogenous in the temporality of waiting, endurance and duration.

A weak power in wait.

Most of these drawings relinquish the idea of the visual background. Or rather, the page and its emptiness is the background against which the thing erupts, as though to look at us. In some cases the thing is the background. Benjamin said: “To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.”^[3] I have not just looked at these things. I have drawn them out of the sensation of being looked at by them: their gaze. Alongside the usefulness of the object, which will be signified by the drawings, the still life in the silence of the resting object(s) restores presence and potentiality to them and refers us to the worlds of which the objects are a part, worlds they help build, the human activities that activate from them, as well as the human beings for whom they become objective correlatives. Their silence is paradoxically a restorative expression of that dynamism.

Details of the Drawings

1. bottle and air (ink & watercolour / 19.1 X 11.3 cm)
2. pillow (oil pastel / 21 X 29.7 cm)
3. cement-mixer (charcoal / 21 X 29.7 cm)
4. my mother’s clothes on a line and a washing stone (coloured pencil / 14.8 X 21 cm)
5. lawn mower (coloured pencil / 14.8 X 21 cm)
6. khalbatta (charcoal & coloured pencil / 21 X 14.8 cm)
7. yellow hospital chair (coloured pencil / 21 X 14.8 cm)
8. iron aruvamanai (conte, charcoal & coloured pencil / 14.8 X 21 cm)
9. construction still life: a giant yarn of armoured cable, loose sticks and cement blocks (conte / 14.8 X 21 cm)
10. slippers (sepia lead / 21 X 14.8 cm)
11. a row of chairs in a shop (sepia lead & coloured pencil / 21 X 14.8 cm)
12. stack of tumblers and jugs in a restaurant (pencils & charcoal / 14.8 X 21 cm)
13. still life: mug, glass and paper bag with a bill (sepia lead & coloured pencil / 21 X 29.7 cm)
14. tea shop, Chirag Dilli I (pencils & lead /21 X 14.8 cm)
15. tea shop, Chirag Dilli II (pencil / 14.8 X 21 cm)

[1] Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 188. Benjamin’s use of “aura” here addresses the traces of the deterioration in modern “experience” in the lyric poetry of Charles Baudelaire, especially in the motif of the crowd. He also considers daguerreotype photography as the genre that produces images bereft of aura, as against the more traditional medium of painting. Also see his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”

[2] The “part” of the phenomenon here is really all that which makes up the experience of the aesthetic object (the object that will be sensed, i.e. the painting): colour, line, tone, shape, the idea of the represented thing, the sign of the represented thing, the sign of the non-represented thing, and so on…) 

[3] Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 188.