Heidi von Faber’s paintings are a feast of light and shadow, an ongoing meditation on the dignity of the ordinary. Her oeuvre is built around food—bread rolls, cheeses, bowls of berries, pastries, and, in one of her most striking works, a simple stack of pancakes. Yet these are never casual images of sustenance. Under her brush, such subjects become monumental, staged against impenetrable darkness, illuminated with an intensity that recalls the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio.
Still life has always walked the line between indulgence and morality. In the Dutch Golden Age, painters like Pieter Claesz and Willem Claesz Heda delighted in oysters, goblets, and lemons, rendering them with gleaming surfaces that celebrated abundance while hinting at its fragility. In Spain, painters such as Juan Sánchez Cotán pursued an even starker path, suspending fruits and vegetables in shadowy voids that seemed to whisper of mortality. Caravaggio himself blurred the sacred and the profane, granting divine gravity to both saints and tavern boys through the force of light.
Von Faber inherits all these traditions, but she does not merely imitate them. Instead, she gathers their visual languages and translates them into our time. She replaces oysters and goblets with pancakes and berries, pheasants and lobsters with bread and cheese. In doing so, she democratizes the still life. Her subjects are not luxuries of wealth or exotic imports, but the simple, everyday foods that shape our rituals of living. Yet the treatment is the same: shadows envelop her canvases, light isolates the object, and suddenly the ordinary carries weight equal to that of saints or monarchs.
It is in Pancakes, Raspberries and Blackberries (2025) that her vision crystallizes most fully. The painting depicts a stack of pancakes, syrup cascading like liquid amber, crowned with raspberries and blackberries rendered in near-hyperreal detail. Against the darkness, the plate glows like an altar, the fruit luminous as though lit from within. What in life is a fleeting, unceremonious breakfast becomes here an image of permanence, contemplation, even reverence.
The influences converge seamlessly. The gleam of syrup and the lush surface of the berries recall the Dutch masters, who saw in food both sensual pleasure and allegory. The starkness of the composition echoes the Spanish bodegón, where simplicity heightens the sacredness of the everyday. The chiaroscuro is pure Caravaggio: light revealing not only form but meaning, bathing an ordinary meal in revelation. At the same time, von Faber embraces the precision of modern realism, painting details so sharply that the berries seem almost to tremble with ripeness. And beneath all this lies the subtle presence of contemporary food culture, in which meals are endlessly photographed and shared. Where social media images vanish into the scroll, von Faber’s oil paints insist on permanence.
Philosophers remind us of what is at stake here. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, insisted that the smallest details of daily life—a drawer, a loaf of bread—could hold entire worlds of memory and imagination. Roland Barthes, in Mythologies, argued that food is never neutral; it always signifies, always carries cultural meaning beyond itself. Von Faber’s pancakes embody both ideas. They are not just breakfast, but ritual and comfort, fragility and abundance. They point to the fleeting sweetness of life, caught for a moment in light before it passes.
Seen within the arc of her oeuvre, this painting becomes a kind of crescendo. The breads, cheeses, fruits, and pastries that populate her gallery all build toward this moment, where the humble pancake takes on the weight of an icon. It is not that von Faber abandons tradition; rather, she expands it, reminding us that the language of still life belongs as much to the twenty-first century as it did to the seventeenth.
For me, this work is not just beautiful—it is instructive. It asks me to slow down, to see the sacred in the rituals of daily life, to recognize that meaning is not elsewhere but here, at the breakfast table, in the sweetness of fruit, in the warmth of bread. Von Faber’s vision is clear: the extraordinary is always hidden in the ordinary, waiting for light to reveal it.
See von Faber's Still Life here.