Pear, Passion Fruit and Lychee Possibly 2000 - 2001

Here's Wolfgang Tillmans' still life, *Pear, Passion Fruit and Lychee.* It's a photograph, of course, but if you imagine it as a painting, it's an interesting combo: the light yellows and greens, set against the dark purple of the passion fruit. I'm thinking about what it might have been like for Tillmans to arrange this setup. Does he labor over the composition, or is he led by intuition? What does he want us to feel when we look at this? The colours and textures do a lot of the work: there's an almost slimy quality to the exposed flesh of the fruit, offset by the smoothness of the lychees. There’s a beautiful tradition of still life painting in art history, but here the artist uses photography to compose something new. Artists are always in conversation, always finding ways to do something new with old ideas. And that’s how art keeps moving forward. We try things out. We fail. We try again.