Stilleven

“The day someone looking at my pictures asked me why I had photographed paintings, I knew my goal – illusion – had been achieved.” Guido Mocafico Stilleven is Guido Mocafico’s interpretation of the great Dutch and German still-life paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By painstakingly reconstructing banquet and floral scenes as well as vanitas still-lifes by artists including Floris van Dijck and Pieter Claesz, Mocafico not only copies these paintings but brings them back to life. Using a large-format analogue camera with colour transparencies, Mocafico creates brilliant images with the highest degree of verisimilitude. Mocafico’s triumph, however, is not only recreating the appearance of things, but his restaging of the devout, mystical atmosphere of these paintings.