Basket with Fruit
Caravaggio c. 1597
Oil on canvas, 31 x 47 cm
Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan
In Caravaggio's famous painting
Basket with Fruit, a selection of imperfect summer fruits,
including an apple, a pear, an assortment of grapes and figs and
associated foliage, is arranged beautifully in a wicker basket,
which balances precariously on a ledge. Thus Caravaggio creates an
illusion, seemingly pushing the basket out of the picture plane into
the space of the spectator. So powerful is the effect that there is
a palpable sense of impending accident. Basket with Fruit was
possibly a study for a detail of the Italian master's larger
religious picture The Summer at Emmaus (1601), which depicts Christ
shortly after his resurrection, revealing his true identity to two
disciples. The same basket of fruit appears in the foreground of
this picture and again it sits perilously on the table's edge.
For
Chan, the image itself was less important than its 'unveiling' in an
animated form: 'I initially wanted to make a moving image from
scratch. It was my intention that this DIY projector would respond
to the animation in form.' But that Chan should look both to still
life and to Caravaggio for subject matter today, particularly for an
animated projection, is intriguing. Still life was once an arena in
which artists displayed their facility and technique in portraying
the surface of inanimate objects. One sees this in the many textures
of objects - fish, glass, oranges, silverware - that artists
represented in the Dutch 17th century genre. Mostly, these kinds of
pictures were understood as memento mori or vanitas
works: reminders of the transience of life and the certainty of
death. Art-historian Norman Bryson, however, has argued that these
are paintings about the everyday and our quotidian experience of the
object world: 'still life pitches itself at a level of material
existence where nothing exceptional occurs: there is wholesale
eviction of the Event.'
Chan's silent video makes literal the
movement implied in Caravaggio's still life. But the dynamics are
the opposite of the impending swift and downward trajectory that the
painting suggests. Chan's animation, projected in a circular format,
depicts a brightly coloured and meticulously rendered basket of
fruit supported by a ledge. The dark green foliage hovering around
the fruit begins to quiver. The leaves, followed by small fruits and
stalks, dance slowly upwards, as if riding on a soundless, invisible
and uneven current. These fragile objects break and fragment. The
larger pieces begin to move. Agitated bunches of grapes are pulled
upwards and apart; the pieces spread and float skywards, trailed by
all that remains. As the last piece of fruit rises, the basket too
becomes buoyant, seemingly drawn by the same anti-gravity force, but
only just long enough for its shadow to leave the ground and
disappear. And then the cycle begins again.
