Still Life After Giorgio Morandi 1988, chapter 3, The Works

The WORKS, a journey in seeing, chapter 3: 1988 Still Life After Giorgio Morandi

My first paintings were still lifes, created as part of an assignment at the academy. Inspired by Morandi, we were asked to construct a composition and paint it. Bottles, bowls, simple objects.

Yet I quickly felt that it was not only about the objects themselves.

Morandi moved me because his work carried a silence that seemed larger than what was depicted. His bottles and jars were not merely things on a table; they seemed to breathe within their own space. As if their relationships, their proximity, their quiet presence mattered more than their function or name.

In my own early still lifes, I noticed that I was not only trying to represent what I saw, but searching for what happened between things. For the tension between form and emptiness, between contour and dissolution.

Looking back, I can see that something began there that never left: lines leading into depth, interrupted by softer, more amorphous forms. A search for space, without yet calling it that.

For me, the still life was not an exercise in imitation, but a first exercise in attention. In slow looking. In staying with something seemingly simple until it begins to open.

When you look long enough, things lose their obviousness. A bottle, a bowl, a shadow — they are no longer just objects, but carriers of presence.

Perhaps this was the beginning of a desire to make visible, through painting, something that is not directly visible. Not the story of the object, but the field in which it appears. Not only the form, but the silence that surrounds and holds it.

But here, in these first compositions, all of this was still present in a simple way. In the attention. In the stillness. In the space between things.

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) was an Italian painter known for his quiet still lifes. He worked almost exclusively with simple objects: bottles, bowls, and jars: arranged in subtle variations. What makes his work unique is not the objects themselves, but the space and relationships between them.  

Morandi painted the same objects over and over again.Not to perfect them, but to see differently each time.

“Nothing is more abstract than reality” — Giorgio Morandi