Marianna Constanti

Marianna Constanti revisits Renaissance masters, some of the finest Spanish, Italian, French, Flemish and Dutch still life painters of all time and she rereads them in a totally novel perspective through her photographic lens. The list of those she pays homage to includes Diego Velásquez, Juan Sanchez Cotan, Francisco de Zurbarán, Luis Meléndez, Luis Egidio Meléndez, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Jacques Linard, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Frans Francken II, Floris van Dijck and Jan Baptist Weenix. Her reminiscences of supreme still lifes are meticulously staged photographic tableaux with present day objects, flowers and dead game, and with living personae as her sitters, (namely her grandmother, friends and even her own homodiegetic self, assuming the role of a faint human presence) depicted half-length and non-dramatic. The artist’s complete technical competence transposes animate and inanimate figures into a different historical epoch and produces forms that stand out against a plain, dark or muted surrounding space, with a physical prowess, observed in the painters under study. Moreover, her manipulation of light attains an atmospheric unity between foreground and background, bringing about a striking affinity with the models at hand.