In his process of appropriation of the most famous and recognisable works in the history of art, the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz (São Paulo, Brazil, 1961) began a series, Pictures of Magazines 2 (2006), in which the material for the first phase of the production process is the glossy paper of fashion magazines. Many of these pieces were begun during the numerous flights taken by the artist between the United States and Brazil. As it is not permitted to take scissors or cutters onto an aircraft, he has to tear out the small pieces of paper – in this case, little circles – with his hands, so using an artisanal photomontage technique to create a new image that imitates the appearance of the original artwork. There are works in this series that recall the first visual impression made by paintings like the bathers of Edgar Degas, or pictures by Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Jasper Johns or Caspar David Friedrich. The photomontage is afterwards photographed and enlarged to a giant format.

Vik Muniz obliges the viewer to accumulate the reception of two successive moments of the gaze, near and far, playing ironically with the public’s ritual of approaching an Impressionist painting to analyse its brushwork. These photographed photomontages first present the recognisable appearance of the original work, always a very famous painting, and then the details of the thousands of images hidden in the folds of the figure in a peculiar interpretation of mass culture. The two readings generate a tension between image and process and between memory and vision.

In the case of the photograph in the Banco de España Collection that concerns us here, the referent is the famous still life painted in oil on canvas by Michelangelo Caravaggio in 1596, Bouquet of Fruit (Canestra di frutta, Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan). The wicker basket is full of summer fruits, among them peaches and apples gnawed by worms and about to rot. The basket furthermore rests precariously on a window ledge, and could easily be blown off by a gust of wind. In this way, the Baroque painter emphasised the thin line separating the place of the representation from that of the enunciation while at the same time narrating an instant in suspense. In terms of Erwin Panofsky’s theory of covert symbolism and his iconological method, Baroque still lifes refer to the fleetingness of existence, as expressed in the macabre cemeteries of the Capuchin monks: “What you are, we were. What we are, you will be.”

I should like to end by pointing out an intriguing reference made by Muniz’s photomontage to the still life by Caravaggio. The recent examination of the Baroque canvas with X-rays has shown that its material was reused, a common practice at the time. What has been discovered under the still life in this case is a series of decorative grotesques painted by the Milanese artist in a vein similar to those painted by his great friend Prospero Orsi (Prosperino delle Grottesche), which reproduced the architectural ornamentations of classical Rome.

If the fruits were fragile, so too are the small pieces of paper torn out by hand. If Caravaggio recorded the instant of a still life that would soon loose its freshness, Vik Muniz similarly takes his aim at a moment that he too considers unique. While capricious adornments with fantastic animals or semi-human creatures are hidden under the Baroque painting, the work produced by the Brazilian artist reveals, when we approach it, a rich universe of fragments of legs, faces of famous personalities, unconnected letters or smiling mouths advertising toothpaste, like an unnerving and apparently endless set of Russian dolls.

Isabel Tejeda