SLICE OF LIFE

This painting is part of the collection Slice of Life made of seven oversized oil paintings representing baskets of fruits. Each basket is embellished with a specific gaudy and festive ribbon. It is obviously a gift : a gift to daily life or to a person to whom one should give a bit of life. The dark background prevents any perception of space. Only the reflection of light on the fruits gives us a feeling of depth and temporality. The theme looks familiar. The genre of still life, as part of a long tradition, sends us back to our transient nature, to our unnatural liking for overabundance and sermonizes us compulsively to remind us that the spiritual dimension is as essential as the material side and that everything is doomed to die.

Historically and despite its popularity, still life ranks last in the artistic recognition as a pictorial subject.

« Still life is the infantryman in the army of artists »

Slice of Life/Tranche de vie : little ordinary details of daily life that come very close to absurdity, in a duality between comical and dramatic events. A direct connection to a Belgian sense of humor and irony. Evidences and traditions taken out of their context and revived. Isolated and reinterpreted everyday life. Pictorial art as a mirror of our existence. Slice of Life / Tranche de vie is not only a research on the change of status of the theme but it is also a personal analysis of the pictorial tradition itself.

« Life is short, art is lengthy, painting will survive »