We present below the curatorial text written by critic, professor, curator and artistic director Simone Azzoni on the occasion of the publication of Vida Detenida, the photobook by the acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. The volume accompanied the eponymous exhibition, held in Verona during the Grenze. Arsenali Fotografici festival, from September 20 to October 21, 2025.
27 November 2025
The ultimate extreme pleasure, that of the end, culinary hedonism at the edges and on the brink of life. Vida Detenida, untranslatable into Italian, is suspended life, frozen life, life hanging on the threshold of courtship that unsettles every false aesthetic-consolatory illusion.
Beauty and fragile temporal contingency, classicism compromised by time and the everyday. The still life escapes the moralistic, didactic categories of the seventeenth century, the Northern European academic conventions, and the stylistic exercise of collection, to become a melancholic maceration and a poignant exposure to decay.
In the end of a withered flower, of a repeated object removed from the sterile Morandian memories, elegy is evaded. Even the poetry of desire vanishes, as does the rhetoric of stoic acceptance: for the banal is not banal, the simple is not simple, the familiar is unsettling.
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Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
“We shall find strength in what remains,” Wordsworth wrote, and what remains in these “still lifes” is what measures our insatiable desire for beauty.
Here, knowledge of the world or a conceptual reading of reality plays no part. The need for beauty is not delegated to anything else, to the ephemeral of cinema or design. Looking back in order to gaze forward, the object seduces us and abandons us to a silent future.
Those reflections of light that play across surfaces, that domesticity of the instantaneous present, are absolute particulars, supreme contingencies that fix life (suspend it) in an image that cannot be deferred to anything else.
Here, temporal dislocations relieve matter of the burden of passion, crystallizing pathos into fragile forms of glass. We are in time and out of time; once again, Almodóvar inverts the Cartesian axes of reality.
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Ellipses of places, metonymies of spaces, Almodóvar draws us into resonances with other figures, other sets. The classicism of the still life, traversed by distractions, deconstructs itself in the mixing of destinies, personal, subjective, objectual, artificial, universal, singular.
Consider, for instance, the memory sedimented in objects, that which through use has made them what they are. A postmodern space in which the body-object seeks the soul, finally liberated from pulsional energy.
As in his cinema, things reveal themselves by surprising us. With grand narratives and the power of archetypes lost (what kitsch or Dalí might have done with objects…), colors and forms become enigmas capable of transforming the intimacy of relationships between us, and between us and things, in the time of a flash protected from the world.
Simone Azzoni is an italian art critic, professor and curator. Check his bio.