The kitchen of a society
We are once again brought to the Centro Cultural Recoleta for the “Art a la carte” exhibition and we are given the opportunity to give some thought to food and its consumption.
Through its various currents, anthropology has shown us how different ways of consuming foods constitute a material production as much as a symbolic one. It is worthwhile to remember the words of Claude Lévi Strauss “the kitchen of a society is a language into which its structure is unconsciously translated”, this language is encountered not only in written sources, but also in memories, in traditions and especially objects and works created by a social collective. Foods play a role in emotional upheaval, express the position of the subjects in society and are incorporated into a culture, the Ancient Greeks had already observed “the table is the means of mediating friendship”.
This exhibition is an opportunity to re-evaluate this aspect of plastic art which is a part of the work of the great masters of painting, seen today from the perspective of contemporary art.
Commission sala 10
Jacobo Fiterman
Juan Cambiaso
Alejandro Corres
Facundo Gomez Minujín
Resonances
The painting of still life as an independent genre goes back to the north of Europe, Holland in 1650 to be more precise with the loss of popularity of religious themes. The term “stilleven”, taken from Dutch originally only meant “still model”, “still nature”, a century later in France the term “Nature Morte” was coined, “Still Life” which referred to the representation of immobile objects or inanimate things. A distinctive trait of the art was thus considered to be an order: from the inanimate to the animate; a framework which allowed the social context in transit from a medieval feudal organization to a mercantile bourgeois social organization to be channelled.
Still life offered artists a field in which to demonstrate their skills, it required a realist reproduction of objects as well as a use of illusionist effects that are most radical and have the best outcome. The representation of these elements attempted to remind the spectator of the transitory nature of time. In the beginnings, the objects represented maintained the allegoric signification that they had had in the previous religious period, a symbolism which was being transformed towards the use of subtle symbols with moralising intentions whose interpretation was full of obstacles. The paintings could be contemplated for their appearance or reflections of a different kind could be discovered within them, the way of representing the “inanimate” already reflected the context and for these Still lifes to be understood, it was important to understand the symbolic surroundings and the emblematic allusions.
With the title “Resonances”, the exhibition brings together the works of recognised and emerging artists and evokes the effect of Still Lifes, which does not imply a total collapse of the original images of this genre. Rather it implies an awakening of the sense of the historic construction of art through the diversity of the proposed works, which are particular to the disorder of contemporary art for its level of specialisation and integration of the permanent challenge. Paintings, photographs, drawings, digital interventions, objects, sculptures and installations selected account for the specific manufacturing procedures as well as themes which characterise our time; they allude to respect for artesenal and technological innovation as much as to changes in individual and collective identities, to production and control of life, to social disintegration and individualism, to environmentalism, to, to individualism, to polymorph violence, to ancestral and ethnic identities, to subjectivism and hedonism. There is nothing more extraordinary than as the emergence of new visions; with respect to this perspective the works don’t have a common basis and cannot have one; they arise from different ways of seeing the world and reflect the particular way in which artists become aware of changes as well as of the close bond between knowledge and production.
Micaela Patania
Curator