Still Here

In Still Here, Georgia Pricone returns to the still-life genre with the technical assurance and close observation that characterised her 2023 debut, Botanica Vita. The seven paintings are the result of sustained periods of looking in her Melbourne studio, where Pricone works with an almost scholarly concentration on the particularities of her subjects. The apparent simplicity of these paintings is hard-won. Flowers and glass vessels are arranged, reconsidered and subtly repositioned; the fall of light is adjusted until each element assumes its precise place. Very little intervenes between the object and the eye. Against expanses of white, the density of a petal, the transparency of glass, the weight of fabric and the peculiar translucency of a leaf become events in themselves.

There is a distinctly Australian lineage to this way of looking. Margaret Preston’s observation that Australian wildflowers were “quite on their own”, their colour possessing a softness and brilliance particular to the Australian atmosphere, offers an illuminating precedent for Pricone’s treatment of flora. So, too, does Preston’s conception of still life as a “laboratory table on which aesthetic problems can be isolated”: a place where form, colour and composition might be examined with particular intensity.

Pricone’s flowers retain the asymmetry and irregularity of the living plant. Stems establish unexpected diagonals; leaves project beyond the measured confines of their vessels; flowers resist the symmetry imposed upon them. Against this organic unruliness, the glassware introduces a vocabulary of facets, planes and verticals, recalling the streamlined geometry of Art Deco.

The white drapery provides a third register, soft in substance but emphatic in form. Its sweeping folds become almost architectural, at times suggesting marble or plaster, and bring to mind the sculptural language of classical antiquity. There, too, the fragment possesses a peculiar power: a marble figure with a missing limb or torso is separated from its original whole, yet its incompleteness can make the surviving form more vivid. Something similar occurs in Pricone’s arrangements. Her flowers are cut from their living source and held upright by glass and water. They are fully present, yet already moving towards absence. Even their shadows seem to extend this condition, appearing across the drapery as temporary counterparts to the flowers themselves.