My Salad Years

Chris Sharp Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Los Angeles-based painter Adam Higgins.

For his exhibition at the gallery, Higgins will present a series of salad paintings. Which is to say paintings of salad. Caesar salads to be exact. Caesar salads with salt, onions, croutons, pecorino cheese (and a wedge thereof), whole, uncooked sardines, raw shrimp and cubes of uncooked chicken, not to mention a fly. And, of course, lots and lots of dressing.

The paintings are always views from above, ranging from the classical tondo salad portrait to an “all over” composition strewn across a cutting board of, at times, exceedingly large dimensions. As such, the salads flirt with the conventional idiom of culinary photography and, more broadly, the history of painting. They at once call to mind 17th century Dutch still life and the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, among other things. At first blush, they may seem to be just salads, but on closer, more sustained review, they are about so much more. Such as painting, and more specifically, abstraction (You want abstraction? I’ll give you salad). Light, the more unnatural the better. Foodie photography. An unexpected, if unsettling and graphic eroticism (Salad porn?). A quality of excess which feels distinctly and uniquely American in its fanatical will to careen toward ‘too much of a good thing’ in the spirit of, say, the wellness-industrial complex. In other words, spiritual redemption. As if salad could save you. And maybe it can? Or maybe paintings of it can? It’s doubtful. Whatever the case may be, these surprising pictures are strangely timely. Even zeitgeist-y. Refreshingly so. In a way you didn’t know you wanted or needed. And in this way, maybe they do come with a touch, or better, a pinch of salvation.