Consuming and discarding became the most prevalent mechanism in Western culture over the last century. In the works that comprise her series Recent Paintings, exhibited at the Larreta Museum, Luciana Rondolini undertakes a critical reclamation of “food” consumer objects. She appropriates and manipulates widely circulated junk food packaging, exhibiting it almost as a design.
This work, placed in the middle of the museum, feels unsettling, even somewhat unnerving, because it evokes the intense sense that it doesn’t belong there, that it profanes the sacred space of the historical exhibition of noble and aged materials. It’s a noisy disruption of vibrant colors that immediately commands attention despite its limited size.
Is it a sculpture, an altered object, an oversight?
But for years, food has been a recurring theme in Luciana’s work, appearing in various forms: ice cream, decomposing fruit, simulated whipped cream, and pastry decorations. She is concerned with what nourishes us, what we consume, what we incorporate into our bodies, not only in a gastronomic sense.
In Recent Paintings, there is another contrast between what one expects to see based on the title and what is ultimately found. These bags of snacks can be seen as a portrait of a society that devours harmful ingredients, sold in bright and attractive packaging, damaging both health and the environment in one fell swoop. Poison for the body and poison for nature through the generation of non-biodegradable plastics and packaging, coupled with the constant use of ingredients like glutamate, which intensifies flavors at the cost of creating addiction.
Regarding her choice of materials for these paintings, Luciana cites the difficulty of purchasing art supplies in a context of inflation and a shrinking art market, thus working with whatever is available. But it’s not all about scarcity. A nutrition specialist, she analyzes the high toxicity of mass-produced junk food. This lack of resources to buy art supplies also translates into the paradoxical fact that the most harmful foods are often the cheapest, the most easily accessible to all social classes; while real, healthier foods are sometimes prohibitively expensive, thus having a much more limited reach.
Her selection is reminiscent of Pop Art, which first brought these mass-produced, everyday goods into the realm of art, such as sodas, sweets, and canned goods, as well as the habits associated with these ultra-processed foods, so recent in human history.
We belong to and grew up in a society that industrializes food, where everything is sold with advertising design, highlighting specific attributes and exalting its seductive power to encourage our purchasing decisions. Packaging and its brands become signs of a consumption that is even displayed with pride and a sense of identity. They are emblems of a lifestyle programmed for well-being and convenience.
However, here Luciana negates the brand; she neither extols nor glorifies it. With geometric designs painted over it, reminiscent of modern art, the artist suppresses the advertising identity: she covers the logos, the brands, the colors—characteristics of packaging that make it internationally recognizable and universal to all of society, which consumes exactly the same thing anywhere on the planet, in the creation of a universal gastronomic taste.
After this intervention, a mass-produced package becomes a unique work of art, an individualized piece.
Throughout the 20th century, food, like never before, became part of an industrial machine that, ostensibly, aims to simplify daily life with ready-to-eat meals. Luciana considers it a macabre situation that products are sold that are toxic in the long term, addictive, devoid of all kinds of nutrients, and that profit from the health of a public that trusts the items allowed on the market.
This system has become an unstoppable force that promotes «solutions» and sells the convenience of having everything ready and resolved in a few minutes to save time, through ironic and perverse advertising. Because, to what extent do we save time in the kitchen by buying pre-made food, when we later lose years of our lives due to diseases associated with the frequent use of these products, such as obesity, high cholesterol, or high blood sugar? Luciana challenges the standards of good taste by intervening in the exhibition space with waste materials, using recycled packaging repurposed as iconographic support, and poses the question: are we truly willing to engage in this exchange?
Evelyn Sol Marquez, 2024