A Feast For The Eyes
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Press Release Text
Guts Gallery is excited to present A Feast For The Eyes; an intimate group show which explores themes around consumption, excess and the visual nature of food.
Food and eating is central to the works within A Feast For The Eyes. In each composition, foodstuffs of all kinds are exquisitely depicted. In these works, regular, everyday food objects take on an almost arcane power as they command the space and demand attention from the viewer. Throughout the show, the viewer’s eye is captured and held by objects that they may have glanced at and ignored thousands of times in their daily lives. These objects also offer a glimpse into the lives of the people who inhabit each painting’s world. In each painting, faces are often half, if not totally, obscured; leaving only hands, arms and mouths, the physical enactors of the processes of consumption. So, by analysing the presence of food in each composition, the viewer is invited to discern and infer whose life they are looking into.
The works in A Feast For The Eyes stage a literal ‘feast for the eyes.’ The food objects within these works are consumed visually; the viewer’s eye eats food as it scans across the work’s surface. Looking around the exhibition provides a strange sensation; the mouth and the nose are totally denied the pleasures of smell and taste, it is solely up to the eyes to digest the food on show. Through the act of making, these foods will never rot; they will never undergo the deteriorating process of decay. Instead, they will remain immaculate; glistening and fresh, perfectly preserved through time. In this way, the works are all imbued with an almost mystical strangeness; upon looking at a work, the viewer simultaneously recognises the reality and total un-reality of the food objects depicted. The forever unchanging sculptural nature or ‘painted-ness’ of a piece of fruit clashes viscerally with our knowledge of its impermanence in the real world. -
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