Floral still lifes move from vase to steel as the photographer deconstructs the geometric structures of the Dutch Masters’s work for his latest series, exhibited during Chelsea Fringe
Provenance: Frederik Müller & Cie., Amsterdam, Wilhelmina von Hallwyl
Still live photographer Dan Tobin Smith is probably best known for his ongoing series of anamorphic helvetica letterforms, Alphabetical. The project, which he started in 2005, takes inspiration from the still life arrangements that emerged during the renaissance. It’s no surprise then that his new exhibition, Still Life with Flowers, which opens this weekend at The Storeroom at L’Entrepôt, has an equally rich and engaging historical origin, this time the still life flower arrangements favoured during the Dutch Golden Age of painting.
Inspired in part by Hugo Häring’s criticism of Le Corbusier and the modernists’ reliance on geometry to create form in their architecture and art – rather than searching for form in nature as Häring implored – Dan applied the principles of geometry to the classic paintings of Dutch Masters such as Rachel Ruysch, Willem van Aelst andMaria van Oosterwijck. He explains, “I reacted to the paintings that I considered to be the most successful as images – technically as well as aesthetically. In my opinion, Rachel Ruysch created the best work, in particular ‘Still Life With Flowers’.” Looking for the angular forms within, Dan started to trace the patterns and structures within the compositions of these celebrated masterpieces, finding geometric forms within the famously ‘natural’ still lifes.
Tobin Smith’s structures “look as though they may collapse on themselves, sending coloured plumes of petals into the air to be consumed by the shadows which bite at the bellies of the steel structures”
Dan’s research also threw up some interesting observations and contradictions : “These paintings [by Ruysch et al] were created over long time frames to allow different species of flowers to come into season. Some species were also painted as copies, from existing drawings and previous studies, so the bouquets themselves never really existed as a whole object”, confounding the idea of a ‘natural arrangement’ on a practical level. Struck by the artificial appearance of the flowers themselves, Dan found they “were heavily bred to look a certain way, even though in painting, they were often used to show the virtues represented by an ideal of nature”. ‘Selectively engineered’, the arrangements were in reality far removed from the ideal organic state that nature represents.
After deconstructing the familiar compositions into their underlying geometric forms, Dan translated these shapes into steel, “fabricating each piece from 2mm sheet steel and pre-visualising each one in CGI before cutting to size, and welding them together to create the structure” of his photograph. Filling the angular spaces of the structures with flowers that replicated the colour palettes of the originals, Dan photographed the structures from below, as though shooting a building giving the final image an architectural sense of scale.
The result is a genre blurring series of images that bounce through questions around scale, form and abstraction in order to create order and sense. The flowers, stripped of their shape and outline – “their most elegant feature in the paintings” – become texture and form in these geometric containers, which look as though they may collapse on themselves, sending coloured plumes of petals into the air to be consumed by the shadows which bite at the bellies of the steel structures.
Dan Tobin Smith’s exhibition Still Life with Flowers runs from 17 May to 17 June at The Storeroom at L’Entrepôt as part of the Chelsea Fringe at 230 Dalston Lane, Hackney, London E8 1LA.
