The Infinite Ordinary: A Delayed Progress
Delay’s Influence on Still Life
Most people assume physics belongs in a laboratory and art belongs in a gallery. Yet when I stand in my studio, I experience them as inseparable.
Through my practice at Two Dogs Art Space, I began to understand still life painting through a simple equation: t₀ → t₀ + Δt
This “physics of the studio” marks the bridge between recognition and revelation. In this formulation, represents the initial moment of recognition—the point at which the eye identifies a piece of fruit or a ceramic bowl as a functional tool. The variable represents the Delay: the vital, extended gaze, such that
It is within this added increment of time that the object’s utility begins to erode, giving way to a “forensic rhopography” where the mundane is stripped of its name and re-emerges as a complex landscape of light, mass, and particulate history.
This small shift—this delay—describes what occurs between the first act of looking and the final mark. In this suspended studio time, now referred to as Delay, an object ceases to be merely functional. A piece of fruit is no longer food; it becomes a site containing landscapes, atmospheres, and life forces. The ordinary expands.
While the contemporary world accelerates relentlessly, the still life painter works in opposition—gazing slowly at quotidian objects until their familiarity dissolves. Through sustained attention, the everyday becomes infinite.
Delay and the Still Life Tradition
Still life painting has often been relegated to the margins of exhibitions—treated as filler rather than as a site of concentrated inquiry. Yet occasionally, one encounters works that demand forensic attention.
At the Chardin exhibition in Tokyo, I encountered Basket of Wild Strawberries. Its modest scale and domestic subject stood apart from the theatrical ambitions of its time. Chardin’s genius was not spectacle but endurance. He understood delay—how light, time, and attention slowly transform perception. In his work, a darkened room becomes luminous through patience alone.
Chardin provided a route for still life painters that few have truly followed. His paintings are voyages into a timeless interior space, returning with realities only sustained observation—what I think of as forensic rhopography—can uncover. This is not an easy path. It requires a personal system of painting, and a tolerance for slowness that resists contemporary habits of consumption.
Other painters—artists of the Dutch Golden Age, Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi, Gwen John—brought still life into focus in important ways. Yet Chardin remains singular. He was ahead of his time, and his work still demands endurance from both painter and viewer.
Studio Praxis: Objects, Decay, Persistence
Motif Objects from the Studio Plastic fruits, handmade wooden frame, foam backing
Much of my current praxis takes place at Two Dogs Art Space Research Centre, and at other times in my small apartment studio. I often work with plastic fruit, handmade wooden frames, or everyday domestic objects. These materials function not unlike the plaster fruit Cézanne relied upon—objects that enable prolonged engagement through their resistance to immediate decay.
Aging Fruit in the Studio (2025) Oil, wax, acrylic on wooden panel, 20 × 20 cm
Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit (c. 1599) remains a quiet touchstone. The wormholes in the apple reveal how deterioration itself becomes subject matter when time is suspended. Influence, too, operates within this timeless space.
I take particular pleasure in selecting overlooked motifs—objects ageing quietly in the studio. They are pedestrian, unfashionable, even kitsch, yet they persist. A piece of fruit left uneaten yellows, collapses, and shifts in hue. As it approaches nonexistence, it becomes increasingly compelling to paint.
Why this occurs is difficult to fully explain. Are artists drawn by meaning, or simply by colour, shape, contrast, and texture? Perhaps it is the complete ordinariness of these objects—their refusal of spectacle—that allows them to hold attention. As they decay, they mirror our own trajectory toward disappearance.
Against the Monumental
Japanese Sake Cup and Bottle, Shifting Illumination Pastel pencil on paper size F4
My attraction to small, domestic objects stems from a rejection of the “grand” in a world saturated with greed and glitter. I am not interested in monumentality. Instead, I am drawn to forgotten sake cups in Japanese second-hand shops, or immaculately crafted bowls and plates as they slip toward anonymity.
Watching objects return to the particulate matter of their former space—toward their own nanoparticle histories—is far more compelling to me than any spectacle. This fascination holds whether the subject is plastic kitsch or a real apple withering on a studio plate.
In these moments of delay, painting becomes an act of resistance. It slows the world down just enough for the infinite to re-emerge inside the ordinary.
All artworks and text is by Peter Davidson
