Looking at Gérard Traquandi’s pictures, one cannot help thinking of the famous story of the Greek painter Zeuxis whose paintings of grapes were so realistic that birds came to peck at them. Traquandi chose the theme of grapes in order to demonstrate a metaphor about the illusion of figurative painting; he titled this series “Nature Morte” (Still life, 1991), emphasizing the paradox of the immobility of death versus painted objects imitating life, as nature vivante, living nature.

Although Traquandi is interested in the problem of representation, his still lifes are not altogether realistic. He