Still life
In this series, Carol Descordes works within the tradition of still life, using simple and familiar objects: fruit, flowers, utensils, fabrics, and antique objects.
The compositions are constructed in the studio from found, inherited, or collected elements gathered over time. Garden roses, lemons, apples, eggs, copper pieces, and ceramics come together in carefully composed arrangements, where each object bears the traces of use and history.
Surfaces are sometimes prepared and painted in order to receive these presences, while the lighting is carefully shaped to reveal textures and volumes. Each image is conceived as a pictorial composition in which space, form, and light participate in the same balance.
Inspired by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century still life painting, these images do not seek to reproduce old master paintings. Rather, they draw freely from them, extending their attention to light, materiality, and the silent presence of objects.
Ordinary things then cease to be merely utilitarian and become forms, materials, and presences within a suspended moment that invites the viewer to slow their gaze.
