The Great Restaurant

The Le Plateau gallery, a contemporary art center in Belleville that everyone now thinks of as a Kunsthalle, is celebrating its tenth anniversary. This Parisian neighborhood has become — in its own right — one of the hot spots for contemporary art with large public turnouts. Private galleries and public institutions no longer shirk from being compared to other areas of the city that have greater visibility only because of their more aggressive marketing agendas.

The gallery offers a real provocation that is very hard to imagine in any other venue. For the public, the season opens with this beautiful and curious icing on the gallery's birthday cake: Michel Blazy and his Le Grand Restaurant. Blazy is an atypical artist who was first noted in a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo. He proposes a global and original work that packs a high-quality paradoxical wallop. The metaphor of food and its decomposition — the everyday victuals that have nurtured his painting and sculpture for so many years — has now evolved towards anthropology. The bizarreness of his sumptuous mold-covered spaces, where traces of food were mostly transformed into drawings and unexpected matter, now not only decorates the exhibition space but truly manifests the incredible capacity of living matter to generate food that is much more than molecular.

This is true both for the people who visit the exhibition and perpetuate its evolution as well as for all the other species involved in the cycle of live matter in a gargantuan party and laboratory. With the artist's characteristic humor, the show reveals and validates a number of fundamental procedures regarding the issue of food. It highlights some of its specific aspects: like symbiosis, parasitism, or the tendency towards commensality as an anthropological structure of consumption that is first and foremost animal rather than cultural. The artist's strong and very effective theoretical position molds the protocol of natural production for aesthetic ends. In that production-consumption cycle, there is no waste but only transformation. Some paintings, like his scratched landscapes, Monochrome chocolat or even Choses acquatiques vivantes, are actually made by the gnawing Ratatouille-like rats that inhabit the Seine sewer system. This time, however, while taking living things — whether animal or vegetable — from his evolving planetary garden, Michel Blazy operates a precise sampling that conceptually rivals the guiding aesthetic philosophies of renowned 3 star factories.

The elegant 1997 avocado plant dating entitled Avocat is more than a precious bonsai decorating the space. The artist's meticulous attention to detail nurtures the splendid natural regeneration phenomenon. More than a transfiguration of some procedures deriving from American abstract expressionism, the 2009 environmental piece Le lacher d'escargot sur moquet marron, recalls pompous nouvelle cuisine names and procedures but is essentially the product of the slime of the invertebrate — so dear to French cuisine — intent on moving around on a beer-soaked carpet. A series of works contributes to the production of the experience of the ritual of eating, ranging from the attack on the intimate meal consumed in a front window to fast food.

Staged as a "closed-circuit" environment, Le Grand Restaurant is a laboratory/restaurant that seats two customers and a colony of flies feeding on fresh blood. The work is regenerated continuously and the fly waits to join the man at the banquet. Decomposing rags decorating the insect breeding containers and a delicious drawing table lit by infrared lamps create the ambiance of this "politically incorrect" members-only club.

The public consumes and works at Bar a orange. A calculated wall drawing à la Sol Lewitt is made from squeezed oranges and the ordered accumulation of residual shells on trays and wall brackets. Fermentation generates drosophila flies and attracts spiders and other insects. Everything is calculated like the most rigorous conceptual art.

The show's high point is the organically textured cave reminiscent of pan brioche and the Bomarzo garden. It is practicable. A lentil plantation grows on the outside while inside wet white cotton cloths create bizarre stalactites. With the exception of two planned culinary events — Le Grand Repas on 11 October and the November performance Palu pas pris a Elbulli — the exhibition and Le Grand Restaurant are open. No reservations necessary. Ivo Bonacorsi