The Ingredient, Cultural Code and Commodity Image

Dada, Miró’s poetic improvisations on reality, and Morandi

Rejecting the Cubists’ ‘flattening’ of space, Marcel Duchamp and other members of the Dada movement took a radically different direction, creating three-dimensional still-life sculptures as ‘readymades’ — existing objects.

Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?, Marcel Duchamp, 1921, replica 1964, Tate.

As part of a return of symbolic meaning to still life, the Futurists and Surrealists placed recognisable still-life objects within their ‘dream landscapes’. In Joan Miró’s still lifes, objects appear weightless, floating in a lightly suggested two-dimensional space, while even mountains are drawn as simple lines. Miró transformed his subjects through fanciful colour and free play with form. Potato is a characteristic example of Miró’s poetic improvisations on reality: the subject is a giant female figure with arms spread wide. She is placed against a blue sky and above a patch of earth, perhaps a potato field. The figure’s swollen white form is attached to a red post at the centre of the composition, like a scarecrow on a pole. She has one brown-and-black breast that ‘shoots’ a long, winding black thread. On the left, a red-and-yellow ‘butterfly-woman’ takes off from her brown, banana-like nose, while other creatures climb a ladder, one of Miró’s favourite motifs.

The painting’s title seems to derive from the depiction of a real, recognisable potato: a small brown oval object with three ‘feelers’ is set into the woman’s forehead. Potato, Joan Miró, 1928.

Morandi. Still Life, Giorgio Morandi, 1946.

In Italy at this time, Giorgio Morandi was a leading master of still life, exploring a wide range of approaches to everyday bottles and kitchen utensils. With great sensitivity to tone, colour and compositional balance, he depicted the same familiar bottles and vases repeatedly in paintings remarkable for their simplicity. Morandi became an important precursor of Minimalism. Duchamp: the ‘readymade’ as an ancestor of conceptual presentation. Duchamp makes a gesture that gastronomy understands very well today:

you do not necessarily have to ‘cook’ to create a statement.

He takes an existing object and changes its context, and suddenly it is no longer a ‘thing’, but a meaning. Food art works in the same way: sometimes the strongest effect lies not in complex technique, but in how you position an ingredient, what frame you give it and what question you ask the guest.

Miró: the ingredient as a dream, and the potato as a symbol. The Surrealists restore symbolism to still life: food objects enter a dream space, becoming light, strange and free of ‘correct’ perspective. This closely resembles contemporary creativity on the plate, where an ingredient stops being a ‘side dish’ and becomes an image: a potato may be not ‘mash’, but ‘a field’, ‘memory’, ‘childhood’, ‘the earth’, ‘poverty and luxury at once’. Yes, that sounds bold — but this is precisely how an individual culinary voice is born.

Morandi: Minimalism as respect for things, and for the ingredient. Morandi represents a discipline of attention. He paints the same bottles again and again until only the essentials remain: tone, pause and balance.

In gastronomy, this is exactly what I call ‘the honest silence of an ingredient’: you remove the ‘show’, and the ingredient finally speaks for itself.

Minimalism here is not a style. It is courtesy.

‘Twentieth-century American artists 1’

When twentieth-century American artists encountered European Modernism, they began interpreting still life by combining American Realism with abstraction derived from Cubism.

Typical American still lifes from this period include, for example, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe and the photographs of Edward Weston.

Cabbage Leaf, Edward Weston, 1931.

Frida Kahlo. In Mexico, from the 1930s onwards, Frida Kahlo and other artists developed their own version of Surrealism, incorporating local foods and cultural motifs into their still lifes.

Still Life with Parrot and Flag, Frida Kahlo, 1951, oil on canvas.

Pop Art / Warhol. In the 1930s, Abstract Expressionism radically reduced still life to a ‘raw’ depiction of shape and colour; by the 1950s, complete abstraction had come to dominate the art world.

However, the Pop Art of the 1960s and 1970s reversed the trend and created a new form of still life.

Many Pop Art works, such as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, draw upon the still-life genre, but their real subject is usually not the physical still-life object. It is the commodity image of the commercial product shown in the work.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962.

Still life as the ancestor of food art: from ingredient to code, from code to commodity. There is a genre that quietly and stubbornly taught humanity its most important gastronomic skill. Not frying. Not salting. Not serving.

Looking. Still life is the forebear of food art. It does something simple: takes an ingredient and turns it into meaning. Then the magic begins — and sometimes the marketing. America: the ingredient as form. When twentieth-century American artists encountered European Modernism, still life stopped being ‘about the table’. It became ‘about the gaze’. Realism remained — it is in Americans’ blood — but Cubist logic entered: break the object into forms and put it back together.

Then Edward Weston appears with his cabbage leaf. It is no longer a vegetable. It is relief, a fold, a sculpture.

As in the kitchen: the same ingredient, but a different cut, and the meaning changes. The gastronomic conclusion: a product is not merely an ingredient. It is cultural material, if you know how to look.

Mexico: the ingredient as a cultural code. Mexican Surrealism was not ‘imported’ from Europe. It was grown from the soil. Frida Kahlo weaves local foods and symbols into still life so that food becomes a passport: who you are, where you come from and what memory stands behind your taste. This is what people today often try to imitate with the word ‘authentic’. With Frida, it is simpler: the ingredient is not decoration. It is a sign. It is a voice. The gastronomic conclusion: taste is more than receptors. It is the language of a people. Pop Art: the product as a commodity image. Then comes a turn that still occasionally makes contemporary gastronomy wince.

Pop Art brings still life back — but not into the kitchen. Into the shop window. Warhol’s Campbell’s is not about soup. It is about the commodity as a new icon. About packaging beginning to live a separate life. About how we ‘eat with our eyes’ before we have even tasted.

The gastronomic conclusion: today, taste can be prepared, but the image of taste is often sold separately.

‘Tell me how you look at an ingredient, and I will tell you what kind of cuisine you have: craft, culture — or simply packaging.’ — Andrei Gritskov

Still life as a product: from colour to brand, from display to experience

We are accustomed to thinking of still life as ‘fruit on a table’. But in the twentieth century, the table suddenly became a display. And a display is no longer about food. It is about the meaning of food.

Lichtenstein performs a trick with still life familiar to any chef: he changes the language of presentation.

Pure colour — like precisely judged salt — comes from Matisse.

The Pop icon — like a label that sells a taste before the first sip — comes from Warhol. The result is a still life in which what matters is not the ‘vase’, but the way we recognise a product with our eyes. Wayne Thiebaud goes further still: he paints not dessert, but a dessert production line. Cakes, pies and sandwiches stand in rows, like a promise of stability: identical, plentiful, understandable.

It is a portrait of an age in which taste became a habit, and habit became a commodity. Mass-produced food is culture too. Its cultural code is simply repetition.

Then, unexpectedly, a Russian inflection appears: Maya Kopitseva. Her bananas are not a ‘celebration of the exotic’, but a quiet scene of attention. A thing becomes worthy of being seen not because it is rare, but because it is real.

This is almost a gastronomic ethic: an ingredient matters through its presence, not its status. Photorealism arrives next and says: ‘You want something real? Here it is.’ Yet this ‘reality’ already contains Pop Art’s diagnosis: object, image and commercial product have long since fused. We choose with our eyes. We remember with our eyes. Sometimes we even ‘eat’ more with our eyes than with our mouths.

In the twenty-first century, still life finally steps outside the frame.

It becomes video, installation, a room. Most precisely: the viewer no longer looks at the plate. The viewer is inside the plate.

‘Today, still life is not “what is on the table”, but “what is in the mind”: the product has long since become a cultural code of taste.’

— Andrei Gritskov

Digital technologies have only intensified this: still life can now be constructed rather than painted, like a flavour assembled from sour, sweet, bitter and umami. Hyperrealism here is not about precision. It is about the fact that we sometimes believe the image more strongly than the product.

Twenty-first-century still life: when the plate became a medium.

There is a simple thought that many dislike because it is too precise. In the twenty-first century, still life no longer lives ‘on the table’.

It lives in space. In video. In installation. In performance. In a digital image. On social media.

And yes, in our heads, where taste has long consisted partly of vision, memory and expectation.

Still life used to answer the question: what is lying in front of you? Today, it answers another: why do you want it?

From painting to stage: still life as space.

Contemporary still life is often built rather than painted. Like a theatre set: light, sound, objects, emptiness, the viewer’s distance. The important shift is that the viewer no longer ‘looks’. The viewer participates. You enter a room that is a still life and become part of the composition. Like a restaurant guest who suddenly realises that dinner is also a production, and that they are one of its actors.

The product has stopped being a thing. It has become an image.

In the twenty-first century, a product lives in three layers simultaneously:

• the thing — real food: an apple, bread, salt, wine

• the image — photography, advertising, packaging, content

• the brand — story, status, myth. Contemporary still life often works not with the apple as an apple, but with the apple as a promise: ‘this is health’, ‘this is childhood’, ‘this is premium’, ‘this is ecological’, ‘this is you’. We do not buy taste. We buy a script for taste.

Digital technology and hyperrealism: when ‘delicious’ matters more than ‘edible’.

Digital technologies have radically expanded still life.

An object can now be made perfect: its texture, highlight, droplet, steam, grain of salt. And often it looks more delicious than real food.

The paradox of the twenty-first century: the most ‘appetising’ thing is not necessarily edible. This is no longer cooking; it is the visual engineering of desire.

Found objects: food as evidence of time.

Contemporary still life loves ‘found objects’: packaging, a receipt, a plastic fork, a tin, a delivery, a torn piece of label.

What used to be considered rubbish becomes an archaeology of habits.