Remi Ajani: Still Life Stilleven by Matthew Holman

“The dance is quite another matter. . . . It goes nowhere. If it pursues an object, it is only an ideal object, a state, an enchantment, the phantom of a flower, an extreme of life, a smile—which forms at last on the face of the one who summoned it from empty space.” — Paul Valéry, ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ (1939)

Remi Ajani’s method of working, meticulously accumulating marks on the surface only to annihilate them with palette knife, sponge, and brush, is comparable to an actor who rehearses her lines and actions on the empty stage for weeks, and then before an audience improvises as she performs. These are pictures of life lived; pictures of what has been lost. This new body of work, evocatively entitled “Still Life”, offers a doubled reference to both the earliest traditions of the Dutch “stilleven” or “vanitas”, humble meditations on the transience of life, but also the attempt of each of these pictures to “still” time, understood as a verb rather than an adjective. Whether wildflowers lost in the excesses of summertime abandon, or athletic bodies pushed to the very extremity of contorted grace, we find ourselves glimpsing a moment of these breathing, sweating things, summoned from some empty space.

“Spectre” and “Teardrop” (all works 2025) are both organised around the same, thinned-out dimensions at 200 x 75 cm, as though we can barely catch a “coup d'œil” through a narrow aperture and into a forbidden room. In these pictures, we see figures stood upright or else contorted upside down in extraordinary balancing acts, acrobatic bodies thrown out on a limb. In each case, their performance of selfhood is the scene, and we the paying punters thumbing our receipts. As in many of the formative paintings responding to archival photographs for which Ajani has become known, her subjects here are anonymised, with their bodies eliding into contours of lush indigoes and non-descript greys. While they carry the human gestures of stance, gait, and, in the case of “Spectre”, the barely legible outline of clothing, the figures are registered as human, but not quite human enough. In this way, it is as though Ajani has abstracted these bodies from our ugly desire to always seek to categorise or classify the other. Instead, she asks us to recognise semblances of posture and gesticulation across the long-arc of time. In this way, can we not, in “Teardrop”, see something of Saint Mark flinging himself from the heavens and into the picture place, as in Tintoretto’s “Miracle of the Slave”? Do you also identify something of the measured strength and ‘I know you are looking’ stance in both the commanding figure of “Spectre” and so many Persephones in marble, such as the statue overseeing the courtyard of the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum? Ajani’s works are in conversation with centuries of gesture-making because she is a forensic observer of the human form, even when her relationship to her subject is held at an ambiguous remove. Ajani resists any kind of moralising or didactic comment on the pole dancers as they are: they are neither symbols of female exploitation nor valorised as agents of sexual freedom. Instead, they are bodies held in precarious situations, torquing with the gliding “sprezzatura” of doing something extremely difficult as though it is the easiest thing in the world.

Ajani’s ‘still life painting’, from which the artist titles this body of work, reminds me of an essay by Norman Bryson collated in “Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting”, in which he discusses the form of rhopography–from »“rhopos”, trivial objects, small wares, trifles… the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life that “importance” constantly overlooks.« The still life became a dominant form of art, alongside the portrait (to infer the importance of the individual) and the landscape (to infer the importance of place) precisely because it rubbed up against that lingering doubt of signification: flowers bloom and die as the apples rot, and so the form is suited to tracing the poetry of time passing, not to monumentalise it. Bryson goes on: »[t]he concept of importance can arise only by separating itself from what it declares to be trivial and insignificant; “importance” generates “waste”, what is sometimes called the “preterite” [which we might call a paste action or state], that which is excluded or passed over.« In sum: the still life is the art form which manages to record both importance and waste; its subject is consciously and explicitly those objects which are passed over but nevertheless hold our attention. For these reasons, it is incumbent to consider a painting like Ajani’s “Last Kiss”, with its melancholy attention to two flowers–one deepest purple, the other an amorphous grey mass–and the ways in which our sensibilities are guided to perceive a final embrace even, or especially, because we know that both are enduring symbols of impermanence. Both flowers are soon to be “waste” yet hold, for a moment at least, the artist’s gaze and so refuse to be trivial.

The power of still life painting relies upon its capacity for surprising interactions between objects and forms. We need only think about Giorgio Morandi’s staging of startling surfaces on his accumulated vases, or the surrealist idea of a sewing machine and an umbrella encountered by pure chance on an operating table. In Ajani’s world of forms, where families of pigment and staining encourage us to recognise resemblances if not causal relationships, she draws us into those spaces that have been overlooked but still bear the traces of the past, the “preterite”. “Persephone’s Whisper” reminds the viewer of Cy Twombly’s hedonistic flowers, those works of erotic spillage and Mediterranean heat. But they also carry the foil of life and seem entirely plausible as a bouquet placed at the bedside in a room in mourning. With these double meanings in mind–life and loss, love and grief–we see how Ajani’s flowers ascend while her human figures descend. Everywhere, in this body of work, we see the motions of life stilled. With “Full Bloom/Last Breath”, Ajani’s title evokes at once growth and death, the natural blossoming of late spring and the metaphorical winter of ends, as the artist figures a raging flower of white, accented by lines of purple (once more). The subtlety of shared palette feels somehow in communion with the purple of the woman’s body in “Spectre”, all of which she sets against a dissociated grey-teal background and a luridly vegetal green foreground. Note how that title works upon the surface of the picture, which captures the fate of an exuberant life now in bloom about to be snuffed out, seemingly even in the same stroke. This is how all the great still life pictures work on us.