Banquet Still Life
Rechtstraat 46
Banquet Still Life (After Adriaen van Utrecht) by Gordon Cheung reimagines the pronk still life – a Dutch still life genre that depicts luxury and abundance – as a digital hallucination. Using a sorting algorithm, he deconstructs and reorders the pixels of an image of Adriaen van Utrecht’s baroque tableau into a ghostly digital apparition. A scene unfolds from the legendary utopia, the Land of Cockaigne, featuring a lavishly set table, overflowing with lobster, grapes, and gilded tableware. This banquet slowly sinks into a digital maelstrom, its edges dissolving into trembling pixels, as if the very fabric of reality is slipping away.
Van Utrecht’s still lifes immortalised Antwerp’s mercantile wealth, yet Cheung disrupts this opulence with melting objects, warping perspective, and colours bleeding into one another. What remains is a fluid landscape where the sumptuous feast vanishes like an out of reach mirage dissipating into an eternal haze. Cheung’s work exposes the fleeting nature of earthly pleasures, evoking the Latin aphorism Sic transit gloria mundi – thus passes the glory of the world. At the same time, he holds a mirror to modern consumer culture, drawing a parallel between the decadence of the 17th century and the excesses of contemporary late capitalism.