Among the subsidiary duties of art is that of conserving, and no doubt also of taking extinguished, faded ideas and restoring to them a little color: when it performs this task it winds a band around different ages and makes the spirits that inform them return. It is only a phantom life that here arises… (Nietzsche)

Sill-life painting might be interpreted as an attempt to divert one’s eyes from the emotional content of the human face and expressions of the body. Consider Napoleon’s figure (Jacques-Louis David), overshadowing the mountains with his victorious pose. Or, consider Iven’s (Ilya Repin) deranged eyes staring out of the canvas, carefully designed to silence the expression of every other object in the room – including his son’s body.

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And suddenly table-clothes, vases, old bookcases and loquat branches. David Boskovich’s still-life paintings bring to the fore his own attempts of confronting objects by making them the focal point of expression.

An object, however important, useful or mundane it might be, serves us silently. An object is constantly unvoiced and only speaks when broken, when it ceases to function and serve us submissively. Painting Still-life is another way of making objects speak. In the words of Boskovich:

"In this series of paintings I  combined still-life works from two creative periods. The first period was inspired by my teacher at that time – maestro Ernst Fuchs. That period was characterized by painting pre-composed sets of objects in ‘real scale’. The still-life I painted back then were staged thereby allowing me to discover new possibilities of combining them. In the second period, my current period I painted still-life from the living-room I grew up in. These objects were in the background of daily activity around my parents’ house. Contrary to the works of the first period, the objects of the second period are enlarged and styled. The ‘staged’ aspect of these works is their color. My approach to painting does not involve a photo-realistic reconstruction or imitation of objects. Rather, I try to use delicately exaggerated coloring and contours.”

This series is a chronicle of still-life and if we consider again Nietzsche’s words, this chronicle will always be unreal – a fiction of color, shape and meaning. Boskovich goes on by saying:

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“I have treated my objects as having a figure and facial expressions. Cézanne, who was endowed with the rare talent of seeing the “self-hood” of every object he worked with, from landscapes to the melancholy of an old apple, believed that fruit love being the objects of paintings. They sit there, almost apologizing about the way in which they change color. In this new series I try to unveil the immanent freshness of every object. I am motivated by refusal to accept the object “as it is”.

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This series of still-life paintings is not about immortalizing what an object ‘was’, it is about relieving the object from the burden of time passed and out of its thematic-status in art. And so, a loquat branch and its vase co-exist with Ivan’s insane stare and Napoleons finger pointing at the Alps. 

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Written and Translated by: Joseph Abramov