Le Festin

The table is the only stage found in every home. The Dutch of the seventeenth century painted it point-blank: oysters, a lemon with its peel cut away, silver, a glass on a thin stem — and four hundred years later those still lifes remain the most desired paintings for a dining room. The Russian feast is louder: more people, more dishes, more time. But the stage is the same.

The series shoots it from above. Plates, bottles, glasses, flowers on a gold field, as on a tablecloth of foil; the view only the chandelier sees. Some works are inlaid with crystals and glass beads: the highlights on glass and silver are not painted but set in, and in evening light the table on the wall begins to glitter before the real one is laid. Works for dining rooms and meeting rooms: the subject matches the place, and dinner begins on the wall.

Relief on artboard — dishes and flowers modelled in volume; leaf gold across the whole field; paint; inlay of crystals and glass beads on the highlights; epoxy resin, which gathers gold, glass and paint into one smooth plane. The edition is numbered.

A series for a dining room, a kitchen-living room, a restaurant, a meeting room. The Feast is the studio's most hospitable work: it hangs where guests are expected.