Art and food... in a bow tie

White tables, neat lines, essential furniture, a large room with straight, rectangular shapes, the luminous and clean setting... The eyes are attracted by what, at first sight – or perhaps peeking from the windows overlooking via Cavour – could look like splashes of colours, unforeseen chromatic squirts. They colour the tablecloth with dynamism and creativity, breaking the surrounding perfect geometry. Yet these are not stains: they’re bow ties. Signature bow ties.

Art meets fine dining at I Due Buoi in Alessandria. The other night, chef Andrea Ribaldone’s restaurant presented the Food Works in Mysterious Ways collection, created by young artist Tanio Liotta to enrich the dining room of the Piedmontese restaurant with an evocative and gourmet touch. Twenty bow ties, designed so as to be an essential part of the place. Not a temporary show but a homogenous work that was specifically designed so as to be placed in the centre of each table, redesigning the world of food in a different way. Every installation represents a sensation induced by food. The entire anthology rolls along three ideal themes: the vision of a modern chef, food as heritage and richness, meals as conviviality.

The installations appear in different colours and shapes, made with materials such as PVC, silk velvet, plastic polymers, nylon, cotton, aluminium...

Each unity was designed as a movie scene in which characters portray a paradoxical world, focusing on surprise, the marvellous and the extraordinary. Some scenes are inspired by fairy tales (Hänsel and Gretel, The sword in the stone), by cult movies (Reservoir Dogs, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and by common places linked to the media role of chefs. The bow ties act as a setting for each scene; they become giant cakes, roads, battlefields, huge tablecloths, theatres, hills, mountains, rocks, soft fields...

As these works are connected with the culinary world, part of them are made with edible products, such as bread, sugar and eggs. In some cases soda cans, miniature champagne bottles were used on top of cutlery such as teaspoons or dessert forks.

«When Andrea commissioned the work – Sicilian-Calabrian Liotta, 25, explains to Identità Golose – I had carte blanche: it’s as if he handed me his kitchen so I could make the dishes to include in the menu in complete autonomy. This is why instead of using traditional tools and techniques, I wanted to deal with his tools, modelling shapes with pasta machines, rolling them out with rolling pins, finishing them with spatulas and decorating them with a sac à poche. In other words, applying to my art the same steps and gestures that Andrea considers customary ».

Artworks become an amuse bouche, an introduction to the other “artistic” creation, the one the guests expect from the kitchen: there’s a constant interaction, an evocative reference, satin hints at the softness of a cream, a plastic polymer to the crispiness of a biscuit. The leading intention of the entire project is to unite culinary processes to artistic techniques and materials, so as to present the creations as if they were destined to be tasted. After all, Liotta enjoys dealing with the food world very much: "populating" excellent restaurants with his installations is his passion.

The final result is an itinerary of counterposed textures, volumes, colours and formal approaches, created to make food spectacular, depict it with humour, make it ironic, brilliant and charming.

This is how chef Andrea Ribaldone explains his "meeting" with Liotta: «I’m an art lover and I was immediately struck by Tanio’s style, so I asked him to create a series of installations for my restaurant. Art is the necessary complement for a high standard culinary experience: it’s an additional way to stimulate an emotion in our guests and lead the to a new world, made of unknown colours and flavours».

You can view other works by Tanio Liotta that are also (but not only) connected with food on www.tanioliotta.com