From the exhibition Still Life: 1970s Photorealism:

Many Photorealist paintings, such as this one by Paul Sarkisian, engage directly with the traditions established by nineteenth-century American still-life painters. These artists, such as John Frederick Peto and William Harnett, made trompe l’oeil paintings that could literally fool the eye. In terms of subject matter, Sarkisian is indebted to twentieth-century collage artists, such as Kurt Schwitters, who fashioned poetic assemblages out of small pieces of trash. In the 1970s, Sarkisian made works that reference both these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century precedents. In these paintings, he arranged his subjects on monochromatic fields; the resulting compositions draw connections between two styles of painting, Photorealism and geometric abstraction, which are usually seen as diametrically opposed.