“Belle Vieille Vie”🍊

“Belle Vieille Vie”🍊. Jaime Carmona
Oil on canvas, 50 × 40 cm

Inspired by a photograph taken in Marseille at the end of October. The scene is structured around an elderly woman and a recurring motif, the orange. The fruit appears on a poster, behind a wall from which an orange tree emerges, as well as on the bottle placed on the woman’s table. Each appearance introduces a variation, nature, representation, symbol.

🍊 The orange functions here as a metaphor for time and the Mediterranean winter, something subject to transformation, maturation, and wear, much like time itself. In the background, a young man introduces another temporal layer, almost like a generational counterpoint that gives tension to the scene.

The woman, far from being merely a symbol of aging, embodies a paradoxical form of resistance. Although time passes through her, her presence seems to grow more beautiful, as if she were attempting to resist or even reverse time. The painting thus proposes a dialogue between evolution and permanence, between what changes and what endures.