La carta, por favor
Galerie Crèvecœur, Paris
06 May - 12 June 2021
La carta, por favor evokes a restaurant, a “social” place par excellence and anchored in popular culture. This show is a point of departure for a new body of work for Sol Calero, which began with an invitation from Saâdane Afif to create an actual canteen or restaurant for Bergen Assembly in Norway next year. In her own words, the artist explains “I wanted to start the show by addressing my first thoughts about restaurants in this particular moment. When you first enter the exhibition space the visitor is confronted with a very familiar scene in Paris since the pandemic started: a wall made out of a pile of 50 bistro chairs.” La carta, por favor “it’s a representation of a local displacement where people have been asked to empty the streets and retreat in their houses, removing the quintessential social spaces they’re used to.” (...) "Once you have walked past the walls of chairs, you will find all the works displayed in what are supposed to be street menus, boards and tables. The idea was to create almost a “mood board” for designing a restaurant, so in this case, we are designing a space as a bridge to another space. The “menu” boards you see in the space hold the drawings, alluding that in this empty restaurant the guests are welcome to select a dish that would let them escape to a new landscape. The connection between the works and the future restaurant is still quite abstract, so perhaps some works are designs for tablecloths or placemats, plates, booths, upholstery, murals, interior architecture, furniture. But nothing is fixed. It’s a collection of open possibilities."
Photos by Aurélien Mole
