Emma Ressel – Olives in the street

This body of work was made in and around Lugo between June and July 2016 during Emma Ressel’s stay as a recipient of the third Bard Lugo Land Residency, curated by Tim Davis, Francesco Neri and Luca Nostri.

There is a fine line between disgusting and delicious. On that claim, I ask anyone to call to mind a soft-cooked egg, a squab crouching in a pool of demi-glace, or even a turd-like truffle fresh from its nursery of decay. Julia Kristeva describes food loathing as our first experience of the abject –- that which we cannot bear to touch, smell, or even see, like the skin that forms on scalded milk, but which haunts us from its “place of banishment” beyond our tolerance. It’s only with food maturity that we can ignore the involuntary shudder and dig into a bowl of cooked Brussels sprouts or a ripe camembert. I recently heard a friend ask, “Whenever someone says ‘corned beef and cabbage,’ why do I always hear ‘corned beef and garbage’?”

Even the most elegant cuisine is separated from garbage only by time, and that might be a matter of days, hours, or minutes. Food, like all living things, has a pathos because it has a terminus. Recognizing this, seventeenth-century still-life painters generally worked in two camps: those who dressed up laden tables in glory, suppressing the nausea that subtended their spectacles of bounty, and those who confronted the viewer with the facts of life and death. For these artists, there was a further pointed truth: life depends on food’s sustenance, but it is only achieved in the slaughter and harvest of other living things. Hence Chardin’s painting of a gutted skate who looks on woefully as a cat helps itself to the fresh fish and oysters on the table, or the Italian and Dutch painters who inserted the leering heads of calves, swine, or sheep into their bountiful larder pictures. Imagine, as the surrealist Magritte did in “The Portrait,” that when we sat down to supper we had to get past the sentient eye of the creature lying mutely on the plate.

In this game, not even vegetarians get a pass, for the cleverest act of all is the painter’s sly insertion of a housefly on an exquisite piece of fruit. There is trouble in the garden. All still lives of ‘living things stilled’ are reminders of death. Here’s something else that’s a reminder of death: photography. “Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade,” ran the 19th-century photographer’s advertising slogan. Having a lifelike representation of a thing that is bound someday to expire is a comfort in the face of that fact, but the act of photographic suspension is itself a nagging reminder of the dreadful moment that will come, precisely like the moment that has just ‘passed away’ before the camera’s lens. So, in taking on content that is itself haunted by death and decay, does a photographic still life amplify the deathly metaphor? Is a photographic still life a double memento mori? The earliest photographs were usually still lives, for the good reason that exposures were too slow to record animate things, and the turbid images of Daguerre, Talbot, and Bayard have an aching melancholy. Not surprising, then, that moving forward in time and technology, photographers abandoned the still life to pursue faster and faster subjects, arriving triumphantly in the 1930s at the “decisive moment” photography exemplified by Henri Cartier-Bresson. In this modern conception, photography is a reflexive act, in which camera, mind, and eye fuse as a synthetic intelligence that acts spontaneously and intuitively in response to the shifting terms of the moment. And while photographers today have rediscovered the art of the tableau, the posed subject, and the mis-en-scène, rendered crystalline through the power of digital photography, they still customarily create supposed ‘moments.’

Emma Ressel is having none of it. More than just defying the idea of a photographic ‘moment,’ her photographs share the studious, meditative feeling of Baroque still life paintings. Even her images of rooms —places of human activity, implied by the presence of a cheery fire, disarranged chairs, or a live television —take on the timeless and uncanny quality of the unpeopled, parallel worlds that those earlier painters constructed so convincingly. Part of the kinship is found in Ressel’s attention to the formal properties of the composition. Formalism, the aesthetic theory that meaning and intelligence are invested in an artwork’s line, shape, color, volume, and composition, is a relatively new idea. Back in 1771, writing his Discourses on Art, Sir Joshua Reynolds was dismissive of the “humbler” profession of the still life painter (such was the notion that Man’s deeds were more important than Nature’s objects), but he emphasized the consequently greater importance of what we now call formal elements. “The art of colouring, and the skillful management of light and shadow, are essential requisites in his confined labors,” he observed, because for the still life painter, “these pretty excellences are here essential beauties; and without this merit the artist’s work will be more short-lived than the objects of his imitation.” Ressel’s work is filled with ‘pretty excellences,’ but it is backed by a wry malevolence and a deceptive wit. In fact, the beauty of these compositions, filled with a sense of light and air and succulent color that belongs only to photography, endows them with the fascination of the Trojan Horse: it’s the gift that we happily accept on first sight, only to discover that we’ve let in something just a little bit nasty.

Laurie Dahlberg

The Italian food is perhaps one of the last bastions of our culture and every part of Italy is proud of its dishes and recipes, all born of ancient traditions. In Lugo, particular evidence of this is found in the small Church of Croce Coperta. It is a single nave Chapel entirely covered on the inside with a precious and unusual cycle of frescoes made by artists of the Ferrarese School in the 15th century; a sort of vernacular Scrovegni Chapel. One of these frescoes shows an unlikely Last Supper, with the Apostles Matthew and Thaddeus engaged in slicing a piece of salami. On the sumptuously laid table there is piadina (Italian local flatbread), as well as roasted kid, plenty of red wine and even a cheese grater; as if thirteen medieval peasants from Romagna had gathered to feast. Only Judas, sitting on the opposite side of the long table, is ready to spoil the party.

As in the Fresco of Croce Coperta, Ressel’s combinations of food are sometimes unlikely, but this can never be said for her photographs, which show her personal point of view on Italy and its cuisine, challenging the usual stereotypes and common sense. Her vision is tender and crazy, disquieting and alluring at the same time. Her photographs carry their references to painting and to the history of photography with subtly and they require a careful gaze, one that is at the same time sensitive and hungry.

Francesco Neri
Luca Nostri