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From Arcimboldo to Mondongo: Food and color in painting

Leonard ECHAGĂœE Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, University of Buenos Aires AIC 2010 Color and Food, Mar del Plata, Argentina, 12-15 October 2010

Arcimboldo paints sculptural images created with different food stuff making their parts, and keeping the referential colors of the food.

Fruits, vegetables, meats, and other elements build creatively the figures of human faces, meaning perhaps that we are constituted by the food we ingest.

He paints compositions of fruit vegetables and meats located and arranged so that human forms appear to be observed.

Among its notable pictorial modes of artistic creation, the Mondongo Group make concrete color images with different amazing materials, including food. Especially interesting are the faces and bodies created with colored cookies and candies.

This group of artists produce significant erotic scenes on themes of cultural criticism through concrete compositions using food.

Title: EVITA-PAN = EVITA & BREAD => FOOD & POLITIC in Mondongo`s work

2. VISUAL METAPHORIC/METONYMIC LINK In the authors mentioned the food composition images are similar to a human body image or to images of parts of them. This significant effect, in the context of the present paper, is considered a visual metaphor. It is based on a iconic similarity between the artworks images and the images of reference. Body shapes are the significant references in these pictorial expressions.

2. VISUAL METAPHORIC/METONYMIC LINK The metonymic relationship between the human body and food is based on the fact that the biological development requires food for its realization. This relation is established through the change of antecedent by consequent, that is to say, the food that precedes the biological development is placed as a substance that constitutes the developed body.

The affirmation “we are what we eat� represents the link between both metaphoric and metonymic significant effects.

3. SIGNIFICANT CULTURAL CRITICISMS

In the artwork of the Mondongo Group (specifically in the black series) they perform hard erotic paintings with cookies used as material of the concrete compositions.

3. SIGNIFICANT CULTURAL CRITICISMS In Spanish, the word “mondongo� (the trip) refers to an organ cut of the cow from the abdominal zone, with which people cook a food that has the same name, and this word, because of its sonorous inflexion, has connotations related to the abdominal zone as a sign of sensuality.

3. SIGNIFICANT CULTURAL CRITICISMS

The meaning of these works are related to the instincts, because these artworks are about instincts and their reciprocal connections, since sexuality implies an imaginary “food� to be eaten by the lovers.

The alimentary flavor is culturally united to the sexual taste and sexual flavor.

4. CLASSIC AND CONCRETE ARTISTIC ASPECTS The works of Arcimboldo belong to classical art because in them, a food composition is organized as a perspective representation, produced by means of traditional pictorial pigments. In Arcimboldo and in the Mondongo Group the function of food as expressive substance is different.

In Arcimboldo, food is the reference to be represented by the painting technique, while in the Mondongo Group, food itself is the substance of the technical concrete expression.

4. CLASSIC AND CONCRETE ARTISTIC ASPECTS The works of the Mondongo Group can be considered as belonging to the trend of concrete art, since the expressive technical materials are involved in the production of pictorial sense. The material expressive elements of their work (cookies, candies, etc.) are related to the meaning (sense) of the work, unlike classical art where the only unique material expressive elements are the pictorial pigments for any expressed sense. But there are two differences with the conventional concrete art of the 20th Century, because in that art: 1) the material expressive substance is the pictorial paste , 2) there are not a naturalistic reference scenes.

5. MATERIAL CONCRETE COLORED FOOD PALETTES The concrete aspects of the artworks of the Mondongo Group make it possible to consider “colored food palettes� that replace the colored pictorial paste of the conventional pictorial art. These palettes would consist of series of colored foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, seafood, fish, meats, spices, ice cream, chocolate, etc.

5. MATERIAL CONCRETE COLORED FOOD PALETTES The form of the pictorial paste spots (stains) on the canvas is not predetermined, unlike the basic forms of the food palette, the composition in this case would be placing predetermined forms. In Arcimboldo’s paints there are represented food stuffs forming sculptures, while in the Mondongo Group artworks there are concrete preexisting forms attached or glued to the plane of expression.

5. MATERIAL CONCRETE COLORED FOOD PALETTES

Fruits and vegetables palette

5. MATERIAL CONCRETE COLORED FOOD PALETTES

Spices palette

5. MATERIAL CONCRETE COLORED FOOD PALETTES

Grains palette

5. MATERIAL CONCRETE COLORED FOOD PALETTES

Ice cream palette

6. COMPARISION WITH POINTILLISM In the pointillism technique, the expressed forms are produced by heterogeneous and scattered colored little spots or colored points.

This type of art works need to be seen from a certain distance, but the works of our authors require this condition too, and thus we can consider them similar, only in this aspect, to pointillism.

6. COMPARISON WITH POINTILLISM

a view of details

7. SOME DESIGNS WITH THE SAME OR SIMILAR IDEAS

Editorial design: “we are what we eat”.

7. SOME DESIGNS WITH THE SAME OR SIMILAR IDEAS

“...Only the Good flavor does the feeling good...”

7. SOME DESIGNS WITH THE SAME OR SIMILAR IDEAS

Food and headache

7. SOME DESIGNS WITH THE SAME OR SIMILAR IDEAS

Fruits of chocolate - Food of food

7. SOME DESIGNS WITH THE SAME OR SIMILAR IDEAS

detail of “Picasso” “vegetable form”

7. SOME DESIGNS WITH THE SAME OR SIMILAR IDEAS

Mother's whims in the mother's day

Josef Frank - paintwork