“Don’t play with your food” used to be my mother’s stern rebuke when I didn’t like what she had cooked and toyed with it, hoping it would somehow vanish from the plate.

Then the usual non-sequitur: “Don’t you know that there are children in Africa who, right now, are dying of hunger?” 

The Fridge by Andrew Borg

The Italian 16th-century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo wasn’t too much concerned about these preoccupations as fruits and vegetables, besides flowers and other things, were jostled around to compose his unorthodox portraits that straddle the lines between the genres of portraiture and still life. Strictly speaking, Arcimboldo didn’t portray fruit and vegetable in a culinary context.

Bacchanalia excesses of classical culture and mythologies are among the earliest depictions of food, through mosaics as well as other media. Fast-forward to the 16th century, one of Diego Velázquez’s bodegones (tavern scene) paintings, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, is an early example of actual food being prepared constituting the central theme in a painting. 

No living being can go without nutrition – it is, in fact, one of the seven vital functions of every living organism. Most of us are omnivores with a mixed diet of meat and vegetables. Others, through a lifestyle choice, are strictly herbivores.

The cooking of food, the compilation of recipes throughout the ages into dedicated publications, the artistic presentation on serving plates is a whole discipline that, in recent decades, has achieved artistic status, with celebrity chefs, Michelin guide ratings and all.

Oil on Canvas by Andrew Borg

This coming together of four Maltese contemporary artists in a collective exhibition celebrating food is indeed a refreshing take on such a theme. Food 4 Thought doesn’t document meals or communal feasts in the spirit of Italian artist’s Giancarlo Vitali’s Banquet of 2002, in which the focus is on the aftermath, the post-prandial disarray of a modern Bacchanalia that evokes the culinary decadence of Peter Greenaway’s film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. 

Andrew Borg, who is one of Malta’s foremost landscape artists, occasionally comes up with food-related still lifes that draw on a Warhol/Thiebaud-style references to Maltese pop culture, examples of which are his Friska (the fresh variety of our country’s famous cheeselet) and the packet of Twistees in his No Title Needed, which are not exhibited in Food 4 Thought.  

The Fridge nods towards Wayne Thiebaud’s Refrigerator Pies of 1962 and towards the American artist’s food-related oeuvre, featuring a gamut of cakes, toffee apples, burgers and candy, all in seductive, vibrant colours. One can look at these paintings as a social comment by the artist on the glamorisation of the fast-food phenomenon, often associated with unhealthy dietary habits in the US. 

Lampuki by Patrick Galea

Similarly, Borg’s array of food items, ones that are found often in Maltese refrigerators, draws us in and invites us to partake and savour from the treasure chest of goodies. Uncharacteristically for the Maltese artist who usually favours a more hyper-realistic approach to his food-themed paintings, a loose and fluid brushstroke gives an expressionist verve to the composition. He sets off the vibrant colours of the items on the two lower shelves against the dark tomb-like space of the appliance, while he basks the top shelf in a spiritual sepulchral light that switches on every time the fridge door is opened.

Still lifes of fauna elicit a much more pronounced decadence

The title of his painting Oil on Canvas, where the artist highlights the golden viscous quality of a trail of olive oil, is a playful pun that also refers to the painterly medium used by him. 

Patrick Galea’s still lifes are a departure from his comfort zone of David Hockney-inspired landscapes as expressions of the endemic and radiating warmth emanating from the Maltese geology and topology. The juiciness of the ripe Loquats amid the leaves of the tree and a cloudless blue sky are signature Galea characteristics in which Malta’s sunny colours are honestly translated onto his canvases. Lemoncloth, meanwhile, is a zesty celebration of lemons in a composition evoking Paul Cezanne.

Lampuki is a very popular fish fancied by the Maltese, especially during late summer and early autumn when these are widely available. Stacked in a box in a market stall, these are indeed still lifes; the glassy eyes demonstrate that the cycle of decay has inexorably started when they were plucked out of their natural habitat to die an agonising death on the boat’s floor. The pungent stench is euphemistically dubbed as an olfactory proof of freshness by the fishmongers.

Loquats by Patrick Galea

Still lifes of fauna somehow elicit a much more pronounced decadence and a lingering stench of death, more subdued in floral, that is, vegetable and fruit, still lifes. Rembrandt’s and Francis Bacon’s paintings of slaughtered oxen and Chaim Soutine’s still lifes of fish emanate this fetid characteristic.

Most of the artist’s paintings in this exhibition evoke summer and mirror the artist’s sunny disposition that one finds across his general oeuvre.

Doranne Alden Caruana and Anna Galea are both watercolourists. However, they approach the still life genre in slightly different ways.

Alden Caruana favours a looser textural approach, while Galea is a photorealist that dwells on the exact nature of a fruit or vegetable, making them sometimes appear more real than they actual are.

Alden Caruana’s still lifes look back to Cezanne, Matisse and Joaquín Sorolla, capturing the flavour of the Mediterranean sunlight amid the waft of a refreshing summer breeze. Her works exhibit both impressionist and expressionist characteristics as they flow with chromatic rhythm. There is a feminine sensitivity in her use of watercolour, in the opaqueness and transparency, in the transient moodiness that menaces to run off into rivulets and streams.

Alden Caruana portrays the fruit as a bunch as they naturally occur, eliciting Russian artist’s Maya Kopitseva chromaticism and unfettered style. The freedom and nonchalance of execution point to the saying that: “Watercolour is a swim in the metaphysics of life... a mirror of one’s own character.” 

Cat and fish by Anna Galea

Galea’s mastery of the watercolour medium is evident in her photorealistic still lifes. The relative heaviness and physicality of the two aubergines balanced against each other, their iridescent purple tones set off against the moody backdrop and the chiaroscuro that adorns the composition with a sense of gravitas evoke the still lifes of 17th-century artist Francisco de Zurbarán. Galea strips down the rhetoric in a search for an essence, for introspective silence, creating emphatic sculptural volume through a deceptive trompe l’oeil that invites touch.

Oranges in the Tree by Doranne Alden Caruana

British artist Euan Uglow shared Galea’s fascination with fruit and the intense scrutiny to capture the essential, the structure and the soul of a particular fruit within a staged setting. Both artists relish the sumptuous natural colour of the fruit and transform a beautiful but mundane object into a precious gem, bristling with sensual power.

Galea’s painting of slit-open peapods exposes the assembly of tiny peas evoking foeti in a womb. One could interpret this composition as a metaphor about motherhood and feminine fragility, more pronounced when it is exposed to the merciless limelight. The pod is ready to give up its fruit that had gestated for days and that has the potential to develop into a new plant, thereby repeating a cycle of nature; just as a human mother does when she gives birth.

The stealth, cunning and calculating nature of a cat as it evaluates the possible price of a meal of fish is captured by Galea in a studied composition in which the feline green eyes and the glassy eyes of the fish intentionally capture most of our attention.  

Eyes are the most prominent of feline features, expressing a wide range of emotions. Loose brushwork captures the moment’s transience; dynamics can swiftly change from flight, prey safely in jaw, to fright at being discovered. The constricted pupils, just as in Théophile Steinlen’s paintings of proud felines, indicate agitation in the knowledge that punishment would be meted out if caught by the human owner who, judging by the mixed display of fish, has just proudly returned from a fishing expedition.

Apples and Grapes by Doranne Alden Caruana

Quoting from the exhibition’s mission statement: “Food in its many forms, from creation to harvest or capture, to preparation to consumption is a dominant factor in our lives.” The comfort offered in preparing and consuming food can alleviate the dreariness of the humdrum existence within our homes, much more so during these pandemic times. Thus, celebrating food as art gains more relevance for art imitates life, as the cliché goes. We have more time on our hands to devote to food and we have ample time to savour it and think about it.

Food 4 Thought, hosted by The Centre Gallery of Piazza Tigné Point, opens from June 7 until June 18.  More information is available on the exhibition’s Facebook page.