David Hominal, Still Life / Les feuilles mortes / 2020–2021, Before publication 6, brochure, 32 pages – single booklets, 17.2 × 23.5 cm, offset, stapled binding – published in the Before publication collection, which gathers the pre-publications of authors’ texts or artists’ inserts, which will appear regularly and as a preview before the final publication, L’Effet papillon II (second volume of L’Effet papillon, 1989 – 2007, catalogue of the Centre d’édition contemporaine published in 2008). Graphic design: Niels Wehrspann, Lausanne. Edition of the Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, 2021. ISBN:978-2-9701369-4-1
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For the publication Still Life/Les feuilles mortes/2020-2021, David Hominal has selected a series of dead leaves that, for him as for all of us, are memories of childhood or walks. Beyond romanticism or naturalism, these leaves represent, like the painting, a perfect flat surface and a network of veins that are organized, like David Hominal’s gesture, from the center to the edge of the canvas, in an opening movement, the color and lines invading the canvas beyond the limits of each leaf. The play of inverted meanings between the English phrase and its French translation, Still Life, literally « toujours en vie », but actually meaning « nature morte » (still life), gives clues to the essence of Hominal’s practice. He chooses the exercise of still life to give it a new lease on life. A fragile and ephemeral subject as a metaphor of his practice declined, here, in a cycle both short and infinite, oscillating eternally between death and rebirth.
