At the root of La vie silencieuse lies a fascination: Cécile Davidovici and David Ctiborsky’s admiration for the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi and his ability to make silence, the almost nothing, vibrate. His attention to ordinary things, light, repetition and minimalism elevates the still life to a metaphysical level.
They asked themselves: how do you make still lifes today? What does it mean to observe an object, a fruit or a flower in a world where technology creates ever greater distance and abstraction? What if Morandi’s small studio, its table, its objects and its light no longer truly existed, swept away by the torrent of technology?
Their approach begins with the coldest, most abstract and technological of images and, at each stage, seeks to recover intimacy and flesh. Ctiborsky first works in a virtual studio, composing and lighting scenes digitally. He creates some objects himself while also gathering 3D models of fruits and flowers found online—models originally intended for interior design previews and commercial catalogs. Once living beings, they have been standardized to be scanned and sold. Through composition and virtual light, he seeks to restore their presence, drawing as much from Ralph Goings as from Chardin, Juan Sánchez Cotán and Caravaggio.
Childhood memories enter the compositions, creating a dialogue between classical and contemporary subjects. Plants coexist with minerals and manufactured objects; obsolete technologies, such as a VHS cassette or a cathode-ray television, evoke the persistence of memory. In La vie silencieuse, the only human presence in the series appears: the face of a sleeping statue seen through a screen.
The final transformation takes place under Davidovici’s hands. Through embroidery, the passage from the virtual to the tactile becomes a form of birth. Using a technique she originally developed for portraits, she embroiders objects as though they were faces. The interwoven threads shift with light and viewpoint, giving the works a quiet, living presence.
Together, Davidovici and Ctiborsky exorcise the anxiety of a world emptied of humanity, life and desire. In doing so, they propose an eroticism of things—at once nostalgic and restorative.