Food, fetishism and fine arts in the age of Instagram

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In the Flemish city of Antwerp in 1564, a young painter named Joachim Beuckelaer sat at work on a bountiful market scene: baskets full of bright crimson plums, huge piles of pale, marbled cabbages, plates full of grapes and stretches of carrots. thin , dimpled cucumbers and delicate sweet peas.

The celebration of both nauseating excess and rich beauty was a response to the new generosity of market stalls in the Netherlands in the 16th century. Dutch still lifes created a new genre of food painting that flourished throughout the era and continued to make an impact throughout the centuries that followed: in Cézanne’s sensual apples, Morandi’s fruit bowls, and Andy Warhol’s banana Polaroids. “It is an eminently human issue,” says the former editor of Apollo Thomas Marks art magazine, which investigates the relationship between art and food. “We all have to eat.”

Painter born in Illinois and resident in Massachusetts Nikki Maloof draws inspiration from Dutch still lifes, but its surreal, intensely patterned dinner and cooking scenes explore a particularly contemporary anxiety: a growing detachment from the animal world. He first became interested in meat and fish because they are “those kinds of incredibly grotesque things that we live with every day, that we somehow endure every day. “To me, that was very fertile ground for something interesting.”

There are tons of meat and entrails. But it’s also so beautiful.

In one painting, a fish head with glowing eyes on a kitchen counter appears almost conscious, while another stares directly at the viewer from a boiling frying pan. Another picture shows three glistening mackerels unwrapped from their newspaper wrappings, with the headlines “Maintaining a sense of hope becoming increasingly difficult” and “Nocturnal anxiety at an all-time high” visible. “We have a lot of feelings about animals,” says Maloof, whose works sell for between $22,000 and $75,000 at Perrotin Gallery. “They are both extremely important to us and we revere them, but we also differentiate ourselves from them in our minds.” It is a friction that allows him to “play with light and darkness at the same time.”

The Dutch paintings of butcher shops are especially stimulating for Maloof. “A meat stall by Pieter Aertsen is amazing because it is so disgusting,” he says. “There are tons of meat and entrails. But it’s also so beautiful. It is a real pleasure for the eyes.” She believes that painting animals before, during and after they become food chronicles our conflicting emotions. “Sometimes I think of these paintings as if they were a meal made from all those feelings.”

French-Vietnamese artist julia curtisThe paintings play with our cravings. In their world, animal carcasses hang as if in a butcher shop, a steaming roast turkey waits on the table, and a slice is cut from a tiered chocolate cake, but if you look closely you’ll see that each item is covered in shiny paper. Brown hair. They tempt us, only to reject or even disturb us when we realize what we are looking at. That duality, of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, is the moment that attracts her. “I’ve always been interested in the middle ground,” she said. HTSI in 2021. “In the tension between opposites.”

Californian painter Hilary PecisThe playfully disordered tablescapes represent the remains of a table the morning after a long night: champagne, bottles of wine, celery and tomato juice for Bloody Marys and bottles of Sriracha jostling with coffee pots. For Pecis, this is a way to immortalize a very good dinner or a happy evening. His depictions of the everyday brand-name foods that fill our homes (reminiscent of Tom Wesselmann’s still lifes of hot dogs and Rice Krispies from the 1960s) are attracting the interest of collectors; He has an exhibition at the Tag Art Museum in Qingdao, China, and an exhibition at Gagosian Athens in November, with prices reaching $250,000. There is an element of self-portrait in his compositions; an interest in “documentary: the events that happen in our daily lives,” he says. Painting food scraps adds “some kind of meaning to otherwise insignificant events.” A bite of delight in the everyday.

Instead, Evie O’Connor is interested in when food is given too much importance: tensions around how we eat and in “status foods.” “A couple of years ago I had an obsession with Nobu, Malibu,” says the Derbyshire-based painter. “It was clear that people were dining there to see and be seen or to tell others on social media that they could make a reservation and spend $500 on sashimi and wagyu.” He sources images from Instagram or review sites to create his paintings: bright orange Negronis or oyster plates (from £1,300). She believes that broadcasting our food choices is used to “elevate us, humble us, reveal our upbringing or aspirations and, of course, our financial position.”

O’Connor’s refrigerator paintings show the domestic side of the story: perfectly arranged shelves of fruits and vegetables. “He was researching the ‘refrigerator decorating’ trend,” he says. “Kris Jenner’s image went viral and I worked from those images. “I found the concept that it was probably someone’s job to carefully arrange fresh produce as if it were a work of art very obscene.” Her paintings explore the fact that, as Marks points out, “displaying an excess of things may no longer be a sign of comfort and abundance, it may be a sign of waste.”

But still, the aesthetic pleasure of food remains as attractive a topic as it was for Beuckelaer. “Why has there been such a long history of people wanting to paint food?” Maloof concludes. “Because is beautiful. “It is a great candidate for painting because it is extremely sensual.”