Space of conversion between architecture and painting, John Hejduk’s The Cemetery for the Ashes of the Still Life Painters.

Abstract

The research studies the proposal entitled The Cemetery of Ashes of the Still Life Painters. The aim of the work is to reason out the pictorial and architectural meaning of the project developed by John Hejduk through the freehand drawings published in Adjusting Foundations. From the western cultural understanding, when we look at the painting of a still life, the study tries to refer to this confrontation through the architectural space projected by Hejduk. The meaning of the terms ‘still life’ or ‘natura morta’ are a means to develop an investigation that recovers a look at the conversion between the pictorial space and the architectural space. This link attempts to construct a still life through architecture, from its pictorial conditions, and is carried out by analysing a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé, a painting by Giorgio Morandi, a text by Cézanne, a painting by Georges Braque, and John Hejduk’s project. Time, pictorial space, architectural space, the decomposition of the bodies in a still life, life and death, are in turn the subject of research that attempts to make sense of linear time in the contemporary world. © 2022 Universidad Complutense de Madrid. All rights reserved.