Collective Exhibition - Arnaud Adami, Iván Argote, Cecilia Bengolea, Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo, Nicolas Boulard, Alex Cecchetti, Caroline Corbasson, Charles Hascoët, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Desire Moheb-Zandi, Margot Pietri, Leï Saïto, Edgar Sarin, Bruno Verjus et Manon Wertenbroek.
Commissioners : Yvannoé Kruger et Marilou Thiébault
The First Meal is the first in a series of three exhibitions dedicated to the meal.
Beyond the vital function of food, this cycle intends to probe the social and creative implications of the meal, where guests gather around a table and stories are told. From preparation to digestion, the meal is a ceremony in which the fruits of nature are captured, transformed and assimilated. It shapes both the body and the mind. This assimilation proceeds from cycles of matter that stir the whole of life in an endless mise en abyme brilliantly described in Hamlet. Hamlet reminds the king that "a man may fish with a worm that hath eaten of a king, and eat fish that hath fed on that worm" and sums up this intestinal choreography by showing "how a king may travel through the bowels of a beggar".
This cycle aims to explore the ways in which food is transformed and consumed, while illustrating their symbolic and semantic richness in the field of visual arts. Like the artist's studio, the kitchen appears as a place of metamorphosis, a laboratory of empirical chemistry. The techniques used in one discipline find their counterpoint in the other, and seem to circulate freely from the history of art to that of the kitchen. Under cover of a primary and biological necessity, a meal is also an aesthetic experience. For the host, it is the culmination of a series of trials, failures and trials and errors; for the guests, it is the privileged discovery of a new state of matter, where the pleasure is largely linked to the fact of being able to appreciate it together.
At a time when attention and concern about the practices of the agri-food industry are growing, this series of exhibitions aims to bring to the fore the primordial relationship between humans and food. By evoking the rituals that accompany the meal, these exhibitions will explore the beliefs that surround it and the powers that are attributed to it, thereby drawing the connections between cosmogonic order, culinary organisation, and the disposition of the mind, moods and senses.
The three times of this cycle consecrate three dimensions: the flame (the raw and the cooked), sublimation through degradation (fermentation and moulds), and asepsis (death by Pasteur).
The First Meal examines representations of a primordial and archetypal meal.
Once the hunting and gathering is done, the first circles of guests can gather around the hearth where the food is cooked, a hearth which will give its name to the dwelling. It was during these original meals that our ancestors learned to domesticate the night. They talk about the past and the future, and tell stories, some of which will be passed down through time in myths and legends. It is the myth of the gift of fire to man, made famous by the figure of Prometheus, which is both the most archaic and the most widely shared on Earth. These night scenes were probably the first playground and expression of artists and perhaps even the revelation of their vocation. It's night, time for artists!
One can imagine how much the silhouettes projected on the walls of the caves could excite the imagination, transforming the meal into a shadow theatre. It is therefore the brazier, the support for the meals and the stories, which is at the heart of these scenes with a central flame that must also be fed. It is the thread running through the discussions and this exhibition, which deals with the phenomenon of cooking, from the Promethean myth to the arts of fire, via culinary chemistry. It explores the dialectic of raw and cooked in the works of sixteen artists: Arnaud Adami, Iván Argote, Cecilia Bengolea, Julia Borderie & Éloïse Le Gallo, Nicolas Boulard, Alex Cecchetti, Caroline Corbasson, Charles Hascoët, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Desire Moheb-Zandi, Margot Pietri, Leï Saïto, Edgar Sarin, Bruno Verjus and Manon Wertenbroek.
