EXIT #18 Still-life starts off with an editorial by Rosa Olivares, Life Goes Away Like Smoke which opens the issue with a set of general reflections on the subject of the still-life and its evolution in the history of art and photography as well as its links to the representation of the passage of time and daily life.

A wider essayistic vision is given by the author and university professor, Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, in his article The Time of a Still-life which offers a journey of the still-life; from the artistic and aesthetic to the philosophical and sociological, passing through the melancholy found in the vanitas to the capitalist consumption of objects.

The two central articles comprise 4 portfolios which are 10 pages in length, each covering 4 artists whose careers have made an important contribution to the subject of the still-life. The young North American Zachary Zavislak starts off this set of works with an authoritative piece inspired by the baroque still-lifes and very careful staging which Celia Díez discusses in an article alongside the artist’s pictures. The vision of the London based German photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans, is more in line with a domestic and everyday representation; an apparent superficiality that contains a deep knowledge and interest in the subject, as revealed in the accompanying text written by the artist himself.  A different proposal is made by the Spanish artist Manuel Vilariño who has spent years working with stuffed animals as symbols of mystical, sacrificial and sacred forces. He presents his new vanitas with candles, fruit and skulls; an article by Miguel Ángel Ramos explores the poetic pulse of his images. Lastly, the American Joel-Peter Witkin, as always controversial, delivers heartrending black and white pictures with fragments of corpses and other related elements representing the genre through a very personal language; providing his own reflections in a brief ad-hoc text in which he defines himself as a Clown/Philosopher.

The other main article, The ‘staging’ of the object is written by Alberto Veca, an Italian professor and critic based in Milan, who from a formalist perspective runs through the baroque legacy and history of painting when analysing the compositions and arrangement of the elements that lie upon the scene on the table in all still-lifes.

In addition to the four artists selected for their respective portfolios, there are also pictures from Daniel Blaufuks, Toni Catany, Enrico Cattaneo, Teresa Cavalheiro, Hannah Collins, Pere Formiguera, Flor Garduño, Claus Goedicke, Jan Groover, Evelyn Hofer, Hong Lei, Laura Letinsky, Saverio Lucariello, Esko Männikkö, McDermott & McGough, Douglas W. Mellor, Priscilla Monge, Jean-Luc Moulène, Holger Niehaus, Gabriel Orozco, Olivia Parker, Bernhard Prinz, Olivier Richon, Rubén Santiago, Jörg Sasse, Cindy Sherman, Alec Soth, Emmanuel Sougez, Joseph Sudek, Sam Taylor-Wood and Jeff Wall, amongst others. Different visions and variations (still-life, bodegón, vanitas, memento mori, cabinet of curiosities) as a homage to a classical art genre that is kept alive and revitalised in contemporary photographic production.