The works I present on this site form part of my ongoing focus on the subject of still life. These are works I have executed over the last 15 years, both here in Mexico and New York. I choose to exhibit them online well aware of the limitations of electronic media, which cannot supplant the one-to-one experience before an actual work. Having said that, I hope that this site will bring the viewer closer to my work and intentions and more in general, to still life painting as a genre.

My still life paintings have emerged from an attempt to depict and give permanence to things in the world around me, mostly common everyday objects, fruit or food stuff arranged or found in such a way as to become the impetus for the making of a picture. In some instances, the pictorial arrangements were triggered by formal concerns rather than subject matter; in these works, the subject becomes subordinate to an underlying structure or concept about space, color or form. On other occasions, my motivations were purely experiential and arose from chance encounters with the reality around me. These works are somewhat more spontaneous in nature. In other works, I have focused on memory and here I have tried to capture fleeting sensations through the use of light, color, subject matter and context. This latter approach, though unintentional, appears to convey more of a narrative. My interest in these works was to make more tangible or concrete an emotion or sensation that was either fleeting or ephemeral. What remains constant in all of these works is my point of departure, this is usually reality. Still life painting in my experience stems from the close observation of this reality, in particular the inanimate world that surrounds us. I have found that the apparent stillness which material things seem to embody is set into motion through the act of seeing, drawing and painting. Through close scrutiny and observation one comes to the realization that nothing in nature is really still, forces are at work. Friction, tension permeate all, including the very act of seeing, drawing and painting. Material things have weight, volume, mass, color, position and a relation to each other and to space and though their outer structure appears to be unchanging to the eye and constant to the mind, these perceptions are as fleeting as the light which constantly alters and transforms what and how we see.

Perhaps still life paintings are a way to salvage something from the unremitting process of entropy and decay. A way of bringing temporary permanence to that which is fleeting while carefully recording through pictorial means not only the life affirming forces and beauty of a thing but also the forces that are at work in its very disintegration.

These paradoxes drew me to still life painting more than 15 years ago. I have found since that it opens up the possibilities for the infinite arrangement, selection and manipulation of both the reality at hand and the formal elements of painting; color, line, tone, composition. In this respect it is the most abstract form of realism one can practice, at once formal while at the same time firmly anchored to reality. This apparent duality found in still life work bridges the gap between traditional illusionistic space and flat modern abstract space. This is one of the legacies of cubist painting (more than half are still life works) and earlier, Cezanne's tabletops. It is for me the quintessential modernist genre, free from narrative and linked to reality by way of form. It has come to represent in my experience the essence of what painting has always been: that which is still, visual and silent, an echo of our existence, the trace of our passing.

Edgar Soberón

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico