After Juan Sanchez Cotan 1602
Juan Sanchez Cotan’s 1602 painting, “Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber”, although 400 years old, refers to many of the visual signifiers of a computer generated image. The preciseness of the composition and Cotan’s handling of light, together with geometric forms of the fruit, themselves, that reflect the geometric primitives which comprise the building blocks of the 3D computer generated space, led me to construct a response as a way of exploring the three dimensional space of the virtual, computer generated environment.
Although the images are created using a computer, the workflow is fairly conventionally photographic; build the set, light the scene and photograph it with a virtual camera which has the same controls and conventions as a traditional ‘physical’ camera ie depth of field, film sensitivity, shutter speeds, exposure and a single perspective. Any post-production Photoshop work is very minimal and limited to colour correction work; the finished image as basically straight from the final render.
There is also a real/unreal conflict in the painting that similarly refers to that inherent in CGI; the fruit appear both very naturalistic whilst at the same time bizarrely suspended on strings in a heavy frame, cloaked by a dense black negative space.
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