The Banco de España Collection holds two photographs by the German artist Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, Germany, 1968), a still life and an abstract monochrome piece. Although he started to produce these images from almost the beginning of his career, it was not until later that he showed them in public, as he concentrated during the 1990s on making himself known through the striking and provocative photographs of gay nightlife in Hamburg that were published in the British magazine i-D. Tillmans was then trying to offer a true likeness of the contemporary lifestyle that he was experiencing himself, with its youth culture of acid house and clubbing. He soon broadened this outlook to portraits of everyday scenes: “My starting point is to take contemporary images, to make art that makes you feel what it is to be alive today.”

New L.A. Still Life is a still life dated in 2001. Unwilling to be considered strictly as a photographer linked to pop culture, the German artist began to present still lifes whose fundamental referent is the still life of the Spanish Baroque. In particular, this photograph shows a domestic environment. Framing it on the right is a rock crystal vase that holds a long rod from which a pineapple hangs precariously, liable to lose its balance and fall to the floor at any moment, ruining the entire contrivance. It is a modest construction that destabilises the observer. Next to it, scattered untidily on the table, are remnants of food – a carrot, some ripe bananas, a crystallised sugar lollipop, and what may be a rotting cucumber – pouring out of what looks like a black garbage bag. Beauty in dirt and grime. These are images that play at appearing casual but are planned down to the last detail, walking “a thin line between the things that are aleatory and those which are absolutely precise.” The silence emanating from the photograph seems to precede catastrophe. The frozen time does not prevent us from imagining what will come next, as in Joseph Beuys’s Terremoto in palazzo, an installation mounted by the German artist with the remains of an earthquake in Naples.

This photograph is a vanitas in the Baroque sense of the term. The image shows perishable goods on their way to death, and therefore malodorous, captured at the instant of their decadence. Materially and essentially, they are the same objects which shortly before were beautiful and desired, and had been presented in the domestic space of the diningroom on a carefully laid table that sought to accentuate their power of seduction. The photograph records the remains of a wreck: leftover and even wasted food, with the smeared makeup of objects that have lost their freshness. Wolfgang Tillmans seems to agree with Paul Valéry’s assertion that there is nothing deeper than the skin when he makes the following remark: “To be satisfied in the present, but not complacently. To appreciate and study what is there, yes, what is there. The precise observation of the surface of things is the key to understanding something in this world.”

This crude and voracious depiction of reality relates him to the nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet in his search for the passing and contingent (in other words, angels, though not many of them), but also to artists linked to the neo-Dadaisms like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke. In this respect, it is important to point out that Tillmans does not see his production as part of a history of photography but as an entry in a general history of art.

Isabel Tejeda