John Connelly Presents is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Michael Wetzel, titled “Supper Club”. The artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery features opulent table settings, flowing champagne glasses, plentiful plates of edibles and otherworldly floral arrangements. In this new work, Wetzel specifically explores the visual elements that trigger our appetites for both food and art while continuing to reference the cultural codes and economic signifiers of taste and class found throughout the history of genre painting.

The painting and representation of food can be traced back all the way to prehistoric cave painting like those in Lascaux, France. Hunger is a basic human condition, but what does the connection between food and visual art say about us as consuming and pleasure seeking beasts? The works in this exhibition are sumptuous paintings as a whole, and suggest another world and time. And yet, these are also contemporary images that underscore both the recent decadence of our culture, and our desire to validate our existence by surrounding ourselves with pleasing spectacles of wealth and abundance. The viewer is implicated by his own simple humanity, and encouraged to lose himself amongst the splashes, dribbles, and reflections of a reality that is very much our own, and yet for many always out of reach.

Wetzel approaches the experience of looking at the subject of food through a systematic and rigorous approach to the structure of painting. He breaks down each work into an arrangement of two-dimensional planes and individual marks. A lobster becomes a concert of dashes caught in a net of interwoven colors. It is garnished with singular elements of steam, ice, and fire, altering the painting’s elemental grid structure to create the illusion of time and space. In his paintings of pasta each spaghetti noodle becomes calligraphy, the sauce broad pai nting strokes, and the cheese, drips. It is our innate response to color and form that allows us to be seduced by the spectacle before our eyes.