Dark portal-like shapes contrast starkly against the white walls they occupy while shining objects and creatures jump out of black or near-black backgrounds. These are the still life paintings of Nicole Duennebier.
Nicole Duennebier: Faint of Heart,” which opened at the Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles on January 13, highlights a selection of Duennebier’s recent work. The artist’s work can be found in the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and New Britain Museum of American Art.
Still lifes represent inanimate objects — usually a combination of the natural and man-made. See Willem Claesz Heda’s 1634 “Still Life with Fruit Pie and Various Objects,” a well-known example. Each object is stationary but seems captured in the moment right before or after movement. A gilt cup toppled, prone to roll off the table if we look away; a meat pie half-eaten and spoiling; a lemon half-peeled, its skin curling off the platter; a used knife, the shells of nuts, a broken glass.
The whole ensemble, shining metal and glass built with bits of white paint, threatens to fade away into translucence. There is a tension between all these inanimate objects that imagines movement into decay.
Inherent in the still life, but brought to the surface in Duennebier’s paintings, is the effort to preserve an impermanent scene. The paintings choose and hold one moment — one frame but also one point in time — to the light and to our eye. They remember in paint the curl of a lemon peel in midair; a half-eaten pomegranate with every seed red; a lily just-bloomed. A piece of silver perpetually polished, a glass perpetually covered in condensation.
The effort a still life makes to preserve is bittersweet, as it also reminds of the scene’s deterioration. And so, maybe naturally, these still life paintings — when taken as representations of reality, but not reality — elicit in me a little bit of longing. It’s almost nostalgia. Nostalgia for, if anything, the short life of one lemon which existed 400 years ago.
In Duennebier’s still lifes, this longing, this consciousness that the still life’s objects are decaying by the time the painting has made its way to us and have transitioned from objects to images, is more obvious.
Like the still life paintings of Dutch Old Masters, Duennebier’s paintings not only preserve, but also sugar and gloss their object. Flower petals look candied and fish scales glow. But the gilded beauty extends to objects of decay. Worms form a woven floor in “Still Life with Benthic Species and Fish”; spiderwebs coat everything like a glossy embroidery; tent worms cluster in a beautiful and shivering blue mass in “Tent Worm Bouquet”; ribbons of something that might be hair or guts or seaweed pattern themselves into wreaths.
The fish do not swim freely, but neither do they arrive on platters. Their limp bodies — frozen, if not dead — weave around each other in piles, amassing into shining bouquets of scales and perpetually widened eyes. “Bête noir (1)” and “Bête noir (3),” rendered mostly in brown, are composed of reminders of decay: mushrooms, moths, wizened trees and wilting leaves.
If in Dutch still life the lemon peel, fruit ripe and yellow, is about to fall, then in Duennebier’s still lifes the peel has fallen or is falling. The fruit has already begun to brown. We are shown the passage of time at face value — not hinted at with the half-eaten or half-broken, but displayed openly, worm and rot cohabitating with sugared flowers.
Duennebier’s still lifes are comforting to me and maybe that is why. There is no hidden warning of mortality and no pretending at realism, at painting as pure representation of life. As the exhibition’s press release notes, these are dreamscapes, almost alien.
“Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked,” John Berger wrote in “Ways of Seeing” (1972) — the book from which this column takes its name. In Duennebier’s still life paintings, we are made aware by decay that we have outlasted the objects represented.
If a painting, as a made image, is a looking glass, then Duennebier shows us the looking glass. Many of her still lifes are either made on arch-shaped panels or contain arches as shapes within the painting that hold another image. In others, organic forms open holes into other scenes. These entrances “invite viewers through the looking glass.” We are made conscious of our position as onlookers and so of these paintings as fragments of time frozen in place for us.
Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is an art columnist.
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