BOSTON, MASS.- Gallery Kayafas is exhibiting Judy Haberls newest works, The Chefs Hand and Traces. Known for her imaginative and innovative work, Haberl most recently collaborated with chefs, working in Boston and across the US. Each chef was given a thin, flexible plastic cutting board and asked to use it during meal preparation for several weeks. The cutting boards recorded the marks left behind cutting, chopping, cleaving, dicing each chef has a unique hand and style in the art of cuisine.
Finished cutting boards were photographed and printed in the Intaglio drypoint process. The end results are an extraordinary reveal of marks made randomly. Abstract in visual definition yet purposely aligned by the chef with thought only to the meal at hand.
The cutting board, in a kitchen is a culinary tabula rasa. Much of what happens in kitchen preparations involves the daily prep work for cooking the magnificent meals that emerge from restaurant kitchens. The images of these cutting boards are visual records of skill, artistry and labor, made visible in this intersection of food and art.
What began in my home kitchen as a revelation of the recorded memory and (Traces) of preparations on my thin plastic cutting boards became a deep curiosity about the marks that chefs would make in their professional kitchens.
Through the processes of printing (intaglio process) and photographing the cutting boards on light tables, the fascinating range of the hand of each individual chef became evident (The Chefs Hand). Many factors are also at play in the marks that are recorded: the seasonal produce, food preferences, artful technique and varying cuisines. All of these factors become intertwined in compelling visual images. In addition to the intaglio document of the cutting boards with black ink indicating the chopping and preparations, I wanted another kind of image that would serve as a ghost of the preparations by using a photographic reversal where the white marks hovered in a dark and infinite plasma.
- Judy Haberl, 2018
From Chef Amaryll Schwertner
For us, the beauty of every ingredient we are privileged to work with and the inspiration communicated through the ingredients themselves, join with the tools, the skills and with the inner voice of the cook, to become an expression of imagination, love and ultimately, of cuisine.
Over the scores of years I have come to enter my kitchen and begin a day of work, I have often felt that I am standing in front of a blank canvas, knowing that the first mark I make will impact the entirety of the work and to degrees, those who come to encounter it.
This reality is one shared by people engaged, as I am, in the process of art endeavor. It is humbling and never complete and requires a sharp intuition, (sharp blades) and also a delicate mix of applying control and letting go to the work. Informed improvisation. A lifetime of pursuit and knowledge allowed to lapse to the unknown, before the work begins. The opposite of recipe.
The experience of the viewer in the gallery or the guest in the restaurant, brings along a confluence of lifes references, sourcing, season, ingredients, spice, temperature, temperament, time, the light, the tools, ones perspective, an ability to perceive all that is communicated in the expression. With art, literature and music, there is a record to experience and revisit, which nourishes the essential within us. The experience of food is ephemeral, yet each of the many marks made, which are required to bring it to the plate in front of us, carries within it a record, resonant in our essential memories.
- Chef Amaryll Schwertner, Boulettes Larder/ Bouli Bar, San Francisco 2018