Camara Oscura

This oil on canvas painting is part of an ongoing still lifes series that centers around the embodied exprerience and biological perception. Thinking about the fact that the visual representations in our culture are mostly disembodied and machine made (photopraphy, video, virtual reality), the idea of dressing the parallels and differences between painting and photography as a starting point for this piece seemed interesting to me.
I wanted this piece to speak with a similar intent in symbolism as Holbein's Ambassadors, and while developing the different narratives converging in this painting, the first theme I isolated was this fact that the mechanics of our eyes is functionnaly the same as that of a camera. I was now aware that this piece I was elaborating would follow the same pathway in the viewer's eye as the light of the outside world finds its way to shine into our minds (in the black boxes or our brains).
Also “how can inspiration, so vital, communicate from the artist to the viewer” was the next question. It seems to be as vital as light and water are to a plant. This inner nature that lives inside of us and needs nourrishment and representation, the artist shows it. Could it be that what each of us have inside is greater than ourselves? The language for this piece started to be articulaticulated.
Description: The open case of the camera hints at the inner workings of image making. The water in the glass makes it a lense onto a lagune expanse and shines its light into the darkness of the interior scene. The philodendron leaf coils around it, seemingly enticed by it. The shadow cast around the lower part of the painting points out that the scene is itself enclosed in a dark box, a camera of sorts. Two books extend beyond the picutre frame, wrippling the table cloth, like they were just left there only to be picked up again soon: the canon of litterature lays atop a half-written notebook. The clock marks time. The odd composition aims at making the viewer aware of the imagemaking decisions and of the visual dynamics on which the picture relies. It takes your eye on long tension lines to the edges and corners of the canvas and back again to the central action where the symbolic relationships happen.

Hopefully the viewer will recognize that if they keep looking, there is still more left in there to be found.