Carles Tarrassó


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Dulcis in fundo

2023

Metal and glass table with screen-printed and lacquered surface, edible sweets made with fruit pectins and carrageenan, natural flavourings and colourants
300 cm diameter

Flavours: jasmine and coconut; rhubarb and tarragon; chamomile, strawberry and wormwood; salty citrus / black lemon; sweet, sour and salty chilli.


Dulcis in fundo is a complex work born from the collaboration between Sonia Andresano, María Ángeles Vila Tortosa and Carles Tarrassó, artists with different backgrounds but united by an urgency to experiment with collective and, above all, participatory forms of working. Rather than an art object, Dulcis in fundo is an object to be experienced or, more precisely, an organism to be activated: a kind of socialisation device through which a synaesthetic experience engages sight, touch, smell and taste.

A large round table, almost two metres in diameter, is covered with semi-transparent sweets with a gelatinous consistency, which the audience is invited to eat. As the work is consumed, literally devoured, signs and natural forms, roots and plants gradually emerge on the surface of the table. They evoke the cycle of birth, death and regeneration, while recalling our relationship with the natural environment and the ancient medical and pharmaceutical knowledge of women, erased by modern culture.

The vitality, but also the vulnerability, of the body is echoed in the table’s legs, which resemble orthopaedic prostheses made from raw discarded materials, welded and reassembled. Their sense of precariousness recalls certain assemblages by Ettore Colla, but here the connection with corporeality becomes more direct, evoking the unsettling quality of Giacometti’s La table surréaliste.

The flavours proposed by the work are equally unsettling. The sweets are conceived to produce unexpected sensations through the contrast between sweetness and bitterness, evoking childhood memories and ancestral recollections while generating a desire that is never entirely fulfilled—as in Giacometti’s Suspended Ball, where the sphere and the crescent come close to one another without ever quite touching.

The audience is thus invited to experience a multisensory work situated in an intermediate space between the collective space of a shared performance and the individual space of sensory experience. The presence of the table itself introduces us into a liminal space, suspended between the domestic and the public spheres, between the cyclical temporality of nature, evoked by the roots engraved into the tabletop, and the contingency of human life, evoked by the act of eating and by the corrosion of the assemblages forming the table legs, where materials such as white ceramic recall bone grafts.

The work contains numerous references to twentieth-century art history, from Piero Manzoni’s action Consumazione dell’arte, dinamica del pubblico, divorare l’arte to the impermanent installations of Félix González-Torres. What particularly characterises Dulcis in fundo, however, is the layering produced by the convergence of different authorships capable of becoming a single body.

For those familiar with the practices of Sonia Andresano, María Ángeles Vila Tortosa and Carles Tarrassó, it is easy to identify the contribution of each artist within Dulcis in fundo, whose individual aesthetic languages remain clearly visible in the work: the roots engraved into the table were conceived by María Ángeles Vila Tortosa in close continuity with her Botánica Doméstica series (2020–2022); the sweets prepared by Carles Tarrassó emerge from his ongoing experimentation with the intersections between art and gastronomic experience; and the sculptural table legs by Sonia Andresano stem from her sustained reflection on in-between spaces and transience.

Nevertheless, Dulcis in fundo possesses a strong internal coherence, the result of an intense and prolonged collective process, and presents itself as an organic whole: a performative object that transforms in relation to the actions and experiences of its audience.



Raffaella Perna








Edible installation and participatory performance. 
Royal Spanish Academy in Rome  19.09.2023




An exploration of the peripheries of taste,
confronting the ideas of indulgence and gluttony
associated with the world of sweets.



Credits:Artists:
Sonia Andresano
María Ángeles Vila Tortosa
Carles Tarrassó

Text:
Raffaella Perna

Coordination:
Flavia Coccioletti

With the support of:
Royal Academy of Spain in Rome 

Supporters:
Memi Crimi
Edoardo Marcenaro
Raffaella Pisegna
Giorgia Rissone
María José Sarrión
Luigi Visca
Istituto Marymount Via Nomentana












Resting on this symbolic table, semi-transparent sweets fill the emptiness of the stomach. The banquet, with its kitsch undertones, invites the viewer to devour a glucose infusion while the tabletop is slowly revealed through consumption.

The banquet is composed of elements that are not what they seem. Forms inspired by ancient Italian sweets invite us to reflect on the volumes, flavours and sensations traditionally designed for pleasure by confectionery.

Starting from the conventions of good taste, they invite us to walk the fine line between the delicious and the unpleasant. To ask whether sweetness truly satisfies desire and bitterness evokes dissatisfaction. It is an exploration of the peripheries of taste, confronting the ideas of indulgence and gluttony associated with the world of sweets.