Vanitas. Beyond Still Life
“Vanity of vanities… all is vanity.” In one of the final scenes of Rembrandt (1936), the film by Alexander Korda, the painter—portrayed by Charles Laughton—uses these words of King Solomon to warn a group of young artists that love, money, and success, which dazzle them so deeply today, will tomorrow be nothing but dust. The Baroque motif of the transience of earthly things—of what remains only as traces and remnants of once-enjoyed splendor and prosperity—forms the axis around which Vanitas by Rob Verf revolves: a work that is unquestionably contemporary while simultaneously building a bridge to the artistic and cultural tradition of the Netherlands, embodied paradigmatically by Rembrandt.
For Verf, Dutch Golden Age painting has not only been a fundamental factor in his artistic education, but above all a life experience that ultimately shaped his visual perception and his idea of painting. This is why his work contains numerous formal and conceptual references to Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and many other artists of the period. According to Verf himself, his canvases make visible “a situation that expresses a feeling” and are linked to the capture of an instant, the suspension of becoming—an evasion of the passage of time that those masters sought through their art. Within the carefully constructed compositions that sustain them, no object is superfluous or secondary. Each has something to say or reveal, echoing once again the paintings of the seventeenth century, which carried profound and direct messages related to the meaning of human existence—splendid and fragile, powerful and brief.
It is no coincidence that Rob Verf has chosen still life, the quintessential Baroque genre, and one of its derivatives, the vanitas, as a platform from which to reflect on contemporary societies marked by consumption and the disposal of objects. With origins in antiquity—when it was known as rhopography, the representation of banal or insignificant things—and later as pittura di cose piccole in Italy, or bodegón in Spain, still life achieved full independence in the seventeenth century from historical, mythological, or religious themes, in which it had previously appeared as a commentary. One of its defining characteristics is the inanimate nature of what is depicted, whether man-made objects such as clocks, goblets, and vases, or fruits, flowers, and dead animals.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, still life, together with landscape, became fully established as an open field for pictorial experimentation, a capacity already suggested in early modernity. The generations following Paul Cézanne embraced, through highly diverse stylistic and aesthetic approaches, the search for the formal structure of things. Two paintings eloquently illustrate these developments in Latin America: Diego Rivera’s Composition with Clock (1914) and Aquiles Badi’s Still Life (1927), both of which explore the formal possibilities of the elements that compose their works. In each case, traditional vanitas references persist: the clock, symbol of inexorable time, in Rivera; and the masks, alluding to concealment and deceptive appearance, in Badi. The flowers that dominate the latter’s canvas are another Baroque motif—at once a celebration of life and beauty and a lesson in their fleeting nature.
Even without an explicit message, any still life warns us of the ephemeral character of existence, while simultaneously declaring the power of art. Transitory, subject to time in the world, the objects in a painting become eternal through painting (Pierre Renoir, Peaches and Cherries, late nineteenth century; Emilio Pettoruti, Shadow at the Window, 1925; Lía Correa Morales, Still Life, 1944).
Verf’s proposal is grounded in an awareness of the temporality of all things and constitutes an intervention in contemporary debates about the devastating effects of the Anthropocene—the era defined by human activity that produces radical change on the planet and threatens its own survival. To fully grasp this approach, another tradition must be considered alongside that of the Netherlands: the Argentine and Latin American tradition, in which art has played an active role in diverse social processes and struggles. Living and working within the social and cultural fabric of Buenos Aires enabled Rob Verf to introduce a local, specific dimension into his vision of a global problem.
It is this dual geographical and historical positioning that the exhibition seeks to activate, through intersections, dialogues, and convergences between the artist’s production and a selection of representative still-life paintings from Europe and Latin America.
By virtue of its scale and composition, Magnetic Resonance: Image of Society functions as the conceptual and formal starting point of the exhibition. This polyptych, composed of five acrylic paintings, departs from the traditional format by unfolding not around a central panel with secondary ones, but along an extended horizontal line. Verf adopts the viewpoint of a Buenos Aires passerby—someone who walks the city and stumbles upon the waste left behind by consumption. The ensemble replicates the scale of a city block, which the viewer can traverse, becoming aware of how much of what was once used and enjoyed has turned into garbage.
Verf employs the aesthetic of X-rays and a free play of proportions to make visible the decomposition of what yesterday was on our table, part of domestic furniture, or used to transport goods: food in trash bags, a mattress, pieces of piping, wooden crates. In a clear critique of consumerism, the painter offers a gaze through objects that, like a radiological examination, reveals the condition of the social body. Through a monochrome palette of black and white with bluish accents, he conveys an idea of transparency and rescues waste from its hidden status—sealed in bags and containers until its disposal in vast landfills or, in the best case, recycling. Through art, the garbage of Magnetic Resonance acquires a new status of beauty and permanence.
In this sense, it is akin to the lifeless animals in Jan Fyt’s Still Life (mid-seventeenth century), the fruits that seem to have just fallen from a basket in Martín Boneo’s Still Life (Figs) (late nineteenth century), or those delicately placed by Renoir on a light cloth (Peaches and Cherries); also, by plastic affinity, to the still life by Georges Braque (Still Life, 1956) and the translucent bottles of Emmanuel Sougez (Trois litres, 1950). In all of these works lies latent what the objects in Verf’s polyptych have already suffered: the inevitable degradation and eventual disappearance of both organic and manufactured matter.
The intermediate point between these states appears in Beginning of a Vanitas (2011), where the artist freezes the arc of time that transforms fruit, slices of pizza, plastic containers, cans, and cardboard into waste. The low-floor perspective, opening outward from the canvas, and the absence of human figures make us participants in the everyday act of discarding what is no longer useful.
Although many of the works in Vanitas were produced within the Argentine social context, two oils from 1991—created just after Verf completed his studies in Utrecht—demonstrate that his concern with the escalating consumerism of the postmodern era has been a constant in his thinking and aesthetic program. With intense colors set against dark backgrounds, they depict a confined space—perhaps the back of a house—where the week’s waste has been left. This aesthetic of contrast, with black as an active compositional force and highlights illuminating the objects, recalls Rembrandt, while elements of Otto Dix’s expressionism emerge in the treatment of form. These images are unsettling: the anthropomorphized objects, with open mouths and empty eyes, evoke our own fleeting existence.
Here appears, for the first time in the chronological sequence of the exhibition, Product X—a marketing and advertising device used to exalt the virtues of a primary brand. Indeterminate and anonymous, Product X is always, by comparison, less efficient, slower, and less durable. The exhibition traces its trajectory within consumer society, from its relation to the toxicity of processed foods (Product X [in radiation], 2013), to its inevitable fate of disposal (Product X, 1991), and its function as a comparative parameter extended even to the organic (Vanitas, 2015). We also realize that thought itself—an activity that generates pride and vanity—is just as disposable as material things (Vanitas: The Thinkers, 1991).
A simple thermal cup, like those offered at any take-away, becomes in the brief but striking video Product X (2013) a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected. Perfect in its simple, clean form, the object begins to open and collapse as soon as liquid is poured into it, ultimately revealing its corroded interior. It is impossible not to recall Baroque vanitas paintings depicting a woman half youthful and beautiful, half skeleton. Verf leads us to identify with the cup—with its body that bleeds, twists, and disappears irrevocably—using sound as well. What seems to be wind or passing traffic is in fact the sound of Uranus captured by a satellite: an implacable exposure to which human beings—especially contemporary ones—have been cast, tested daily in a cruelly competitive society that demands constant proof of merit and efficiency.
One of the most frequent artistic exercises in Dutch Golden Age painting was the superposition of pictorial genres, as seen in Hendrik M. Sorgh’s Interior of a Peasant Kitchen (mid-seventeenth century), a genre scene intervened by a still life in the foreground, illuminated as if it were the most important element of the painting. The abundance and variety of fruits, vegetables, and utensils contrast with the poverty of the figures and their surroundings, demonstrating the mastery of Dutch artists in representing the sensual qualities of things. One need only recall Vermeer’s The Milkmaid (ca. 1660), its precedent The Dutch Cook by Gerrit Dou (ca. 1650), and countless interiors of the period to observe the persistent interplay between genre painting and still life.
Rob Verf follows this path in Still Life: Artificial Fruits (2019). As in many of his works, the space is constructed from back to front, in the manner of the Dutcharsters. Using a restrained palette and precise technique, he depicts a room in which the strange fruits of the title are suspended both spatially and temporally. The checkerboard floor and window serve as the only spatial markers, clearly citing the interiors of Vermeer, De Hooch, Gabriel Metsu, and others. Yet the domestic warmth of seventeenth-century painting is absent. Verf activates two of his own devices: chromatic reduction—in this case to shades of blue—enhancing the cold austerity of the room, and formal ambiguity, expressed in the title artificial fruits and suggested by a basket resembling a plastic fruit bowl. These spheres, far from imitating living fruit, appear instead as robotic eyes, witnesses to a scene that is more metaphysical than realist.
The painting thus articulates a recurring idea in the artist’s work: space is a state of mind or emotion, and objects within it are situations—elements of a moment. In an interior–exterior interplay, the window allows a glimpse of the urban landscape beyond the small room, while the tiles rush outward toward us, into that coextensive space the Baroque masters so effectively exploited. We encounter, then, a state of being of the artist that reaches the viewer, involving them and provoking an awareness of their own condition.
In the sciences, art, and cartography of the Netherlands, the principle “with honest hand and faithful eye”—a phrase from a seventeenth-century treatise—was pursued with remarkable consistency, asserting a correlation between observation of reality and its graphic recording through precise technique. Hence the meticulous detail in Fyt’s feathers and fur, the gleam of metal, and the varied qualities of clay and wood in Sorgh’s kitchen scene. A similar line extends to Argentine still life from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Still Life by Severo Rodríguez Etchart (late nineteenth century), the artist renders not only the shine of copper and the transparency of glass, but also shapes vegetables through light with mastery comparable to that of his predecessors.
In Verf’s production, this insistence on representing materiality through the artifice of painting gives way to working with materiality itself. The diptych A Manifestation of Existence (the Plastic Bag) (2019) is made from a bag that may have carried fruits and vegetables like those seen elsewhere in the exhibition, or rubbish destined for the street, and which in other works of the series transforms into the quintessential vanitas motif: the skull.
Garbage provides the key to the journey that began with Magnetic Resonance. The artist once again directs our gaze to the urban landscape, this time through a sequence of photographs taken in Argentina over the past decade (Installations, 2010–2020). Already during his time in Rotterdam in the 1990s, Verf had observed the sculptural quality of piles of waste: “I used to get up early in the morning to walk through the city and take photographs,” he recalls. Everywhere, he explains, people unknowingly create installations. In front of their homes, they choose the boundaries of the sidewalk to arrange objects—sometimes randomly, sometimes with a certain order—constructing improvised pedestals that result in vanitas, transforming the city into a “sculpture garden.”
As in Dutch painting and in Verf’s own work, the objects forming these structures express individuals and society collectively, revealing the passage from use and enjoyment to abandonment and neglect. An image of society—rarely so beautiful, and painfully true.
Marta Penhos
Curator