This is not fine dining.
Years have passed, sharing great conversations about art and its commitments in its different cultures and forms of expression. Father and son, we debated with passion and verve about existential questions as if our lives depended on it. Since I was little, I was lucky enough to be considered an equal at the dinner table, escaping the repetitive french fries and often sharing the "adults'" menu, even though I also used the dining room as a battlefield, a place to confront the one who fed me, refusing to eat and hurting myself with my own weapons. I quickly understood that "I like it" or "I don't like it" isn't as directly related as I thought to "good" or "bad," but that my tastes are born from the human relationship that surrounds them. Over time, I observed that much more is hidden here, that these relationships are full of power games and that on the battlefield, where so much blood was shed, my tastes were structured, based on my victories and my defeats. My aesthetic and the tastes that govern me are thus the conclusion of all these relationships, consolidated in my memory.
“This is not fine dining” is an exhibition born from the need to question a cliché. There are many stories in the world of gastronomy that deserve to be told, but I feel it's necessary to emphasize that the history of cooking, like that of art, has always been instrumentalized by the dominant culture, established by those who held power. The different aesthetics or movements are the conclusion, among other things, of the social relationships of the era and their mannerisms, because "the king likes this and consequently the entire court."
It was important for me to understand that this instrumentalization is a consequence of the same power games that took place at my family's dinner table, but between adults in high-status places. I'm not trying to judge it here; I'm only pointing out the fact that the development of painting, like that of dance or cooking, has been calibrated to the height of the clients' expectations, and not the artists'. Therefore, there are few arts or artists who have freed themselves from the need to be validated, to assume the subversive role of sharing their most intimate madness, with all the flavors that it implies. For purely economic purposes, artists are used to remaining faithful to the demands of others' eyes, constrained in outdated structures. Until not so long ago, "art" only served to reproduce the idealized images of high society, staging their narratives and creating a very precise distinction between the culture or folklore of the people, with their fascinating songs, rhymes, and grandmother's recipes, versus the music, dances, and other ornaments of "high society." It was a way of sublimating and differentiating the power of the common people, and at the same time showing the value of one's own culture as an identity signature.
What does this have to do with “fine dining”?
“This is not fine dining“ proposes a critique of a forced mannerism that has nothing to do with food, quality, or the sincerity of the gesture. It is an open provocation that seeks to very clearly differentiate substance from form. “Fine dining” is the ostentation of form, of the container and not the content. It has nothing to do with the free and unleashed creativity of so many artists fascinated by their own discoveries who find their limits and scribble with them. The search that I share with my father, Bernd, is the sincerity of the spontaneous gesture; the proposition of truly innovative experiences; it is about building contexts fertile for creativity, free from all the noise that prevents attention to the artist's experience.
Let's differentiate between eating well and the spectacle.
Many restaurants, many artists dedicate a large part of their energy to building the container, the form, the concept, the idea, and forget to fill it with experiences, adventures, passion, obsessions, madness. I understand the difficulty of losing control, of feeling fragile, of showing oneself to be vulnerable, of being afraid, of falling, but only there are the treasures we so desperately seek, the nuggets that make art a "real" path.
We all know that historically great French chefs served the nobility, and that when heads rolled, they were left without work and had to reinvent themselves, filling cities with high-level kitchens at the service of what would then be their new clients, the bourgeoisie.
We must not forget that the Michelin guide was literally invented to "burn rubber," a way of consuming the tires of the famous brand. In this very original way, all those Parisians who, being great gourmets and gourmands, suffered from the typical centralism of big cities, were encouraged to travel, doubting that anything of value existed beyond the limits of their city.
0- Principles.