Human Flower Project

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Vanitas: Mocafico & the Masters, Old and Young

Flowers, skulls, lemons, bubbles, photographer Guido Mocafino resurrects an old genre, eeriness intact.

Vanitas, by Philippe de Champaigne (c.1671)

Via: Wiki

There’s a skull in our garden. We splash it with water and it parches again. It sinks its teeth in a pot with violas, and when the violas die – it grins in the dirt. This is our backyard “Vanitas” – though the garden itself proves everything is passing.

We thank Ian McKay for passing along notice of Guido Mocafico, a dazzling French artist, and his latest exhibition: Nature Morte: In the Company of Old Masters. Mocafico’s new pieces are still life photographs in homage to the 17th Century French and Dutch painters – vanitas kings like Pieter Claesz and Jacques de Gheyn and Philippe de Champaigne.

Vanitas images are peculiar—maybe even perverse, as they relish and exploit the same sensuous pleasures they condemn. The Old Master works that Mocafico’s photographs imitate are eerie enough, but turning historical, painterly realism inside out—via contemporary photography—adds a shudder. Double your virtuosity, double your necrophilia.

Omnia Vanitas (2007)

chromogenic print by Guido Mocafico

Photo: Bernheimer

Mocafico reassembles familiar articles from the vanitas kit-bag – like skulls and flowers. (Illustrator Alton Kelly seized on this same combination for The Grateful Dead—an image Kelly lifted from 19th century illustrator Edmund Sullivan —thus spake a trillion decals, t-shirts, and tattoos). Mocafico chooses roses and bellflowers, with a peony (?) thrown in for exuberance; two beautiful heads of wheat also poke from between the bones. Symbols this potent can’t really be deciphered (as in “the skull with flowers refers to human vanity and the transience of all earthly things”); better to leave them be, like our little plaster head in the garden. Let time do its work, and meanings, doubts, revulsions, amusements go on rippling.

Bouquet of Flowers in a Niche

chromogenic print by Guido Mocafico (2006)

Photo: Bernheimer



Mocafico’s photographs, including the knockouts above and at right, are on view now at Bernheimer gallery in Munich, through March 29. The exhibit then moves to Colnaghi in London, May 15 through June 18. (Find the full catalogue, in English and German, here.)

Here’s one more ripple: from Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (LXXXI). For added frisson listen to il miglior fabbro himself read the whole canto.

The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world.

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

    Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

In scaled invention or true artistry…