Fare

Food as subject matter for paintings isn’t the standard art-gallery fare. But works of art are often the depictions of objects of desire—and what we eat is about a lot more than just nourishment.

We have to eat to survive, but food touches on a wider range of issues, including comfort, family, celebration and even culture and economics. Fahime Amiri’s “Spaghetti in Tuscany” (pictured), for example, transports us to another country, playing on the sense of “fare” as the cost of travel.

This artistic smorgasbord at Alice Merrill Horne Gallery features a number of staples from the local arts community—artists we’ve become used to seeing on the menu, including Martin Blundell, Trent Call, Shami Kanekar, Dorothee Martens, Kim Martinez, Anthony Siciliano, Joe Ostraff and Sam Wilson. But we haven’t often seen them take on this subject matter.

As much as flora or fauna or any natural scenery, edible items offer many representational possibilities for vivid colors, dynamic compositions and expressive textures in paint. These works are a celebration of the natural world as much any landscape painting.

We don’t just eat to live; in a sense we live to eat. The eye takes in artworks as ravenously as the mouth does food. Both are equally visceral, and vital. And this show makes a case that we “live to art”—that it’s just as necessary, and that the fare produced by local artists is a dazzling, scrumptious array. (Brian Staker)