Veress Kinga (szerk.): Gasztrojáték. Kortárs ételfotó és -styling. Időszaki kiállítás 2019. máricus 21 - 2019. május 5. (Budapest, 2019)
Various foods, dishes, ingredients, and food culture in general, have been an important inspiration to artists for centuries - we need only to think of Arcimboldo’s (1526/27-1593) clever portraits made up of various fruits and vegetables, or the still lifes of the Dutch painters, created with mouth-watering fidelity. Nowadays, we often talk about the revolution of gastronomy, to which a new kind of contemporary visualisation is naturally linked. One of the most determining and spectacular manifestations of the “image era” are certainly pictures of food and meals - this is an area in which any one of us could easily feel as master chef or even a gourmet. After all, we don’t need to be a professional photographer to eagerly compose and send to each other pictures of a feast we've just had in a restaurant, or which we have prepared ourselves. Such photo-delicacies have become part of our everyday lives, an addition to our “bon appétit”. While we sample them, we are also sampling ourselves: what do we eat and how, and in what way we think about food? Food photos are a chronicle of the era. The quality of food photos is naturally very diverse, not just from a technical perspective, but also from the point of view of aesthetics and concept. On one end of the spectrum we see appetising images that are created with a purely functional purpose - such as photos on menus, illustrations for cookbooks and pictures on billboards aimed at generating desire or communicating prices - while at the other end of the spectrum are autonomous works of art with an underlying meaning in which food goes beyond itself as an inspiration to playful association or the deciphering of some sort of symbolic meaning. The exhibition FoodPlay aims to present works that belong to the latter field, and their creators, with a broad, international outlook. The exhibits include some fine art works, but the majority of photographs are not the result of independent art projects, but productions made at the request of style magazines and websites, or as product promotions in advertising. The common characteristics of these works of art that have been created for various reasons and in differing styles is food as an inspiration and idea, elaboration that is playful or food for thought, and autonomic visual language. The majority of pictures on show here were created as the result of teamwork. The photographer works together with the art director, the food stylist (the aspic sculptor and the macaroni twister), the set designer and the retoucher. This cooperation leads to the birth of amazingly rich visual worlds in which every collaboration has its own unique style, from cavalcades of colour and form that invoke Dutch still lifes to minimalist and purist solutions. Our exhibition offers a selection of delicacies from master-chefs of spectacle. Péter Flanek
