THE STILL LIFES

Wiedijk took an age old genre and made it unmistakably his own. His still lifes are calm and wholly contemporary at once, the objects standing clear and bright against light grounds, an old enamel jug, a lace cloth, the skin of a peach, each one rendered so precisely it seems more real than the thing itself. He could spend days on a single arrangement, weighing the angle of a pear's stem or the contrast of two objects set one behind the other, because for him no detail was ever too small to matter. The pursuit of perfection runs through all of it, and yet the panels never feel cold. Beneath their harmony a quiet tension always hides, and over the whole arrangement settles a deep and particular stillness. What follows looks at them one by one, short and close, with an eye for how real he could make the world.