Cig Harvey British, b. 1973

Made in Camden, Maine, in 2023, this is a picture that knows exactly which genre it is reanimating. Cig Harvey, who has spent the last two decades turning the domestic and the seasonal into a sustained body of saturated colour work, here steps deliberately into the lineage of the Dutch banquet piece — the laid table, the candle, the fruit — and then bends it toward her own grammar of appetite and dread.

What gives the staging away as contemporary rather than antiquarian is the smoke. Across the centre of the frame, several red tapers have just been pinched out, their wicks still releasing thin grey ribbons that curl and dissolve against the bruise-blue wall. One taper, in a brass stick beside the white cake, has gone fully dark while two others still burn. That interval — the second after the flame, the smell you can almost read — is the whole picture. A vanitas would have let the candle gutter as a symbol; Harvey photographs the actual physics of it, the wisp caught at the speed only a camera owns.

Everything else holds that tension between abundance and its ending. A white-frosted cake crowned with dark cherries sits front and centre on a pewter charger; a chocolate layer cake waits on a teal stand at right; strawberries spill loose across deep blue velvet, beside pears, a bowl of sugar-dusted bread. The tableau is built, lit, and resolved with the control of someone fluent in how the constructed image now reads as art — a feast composed less to be eaten than to be remembered going out.

This is among Harvey's most ambitious recent still lifes, offered in three exhibition scales. The larger you print it, the more the smoke becomes the subject.