Carles Tarrassó


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Fasting girls
Fundació Joan Brossa

La frutta che scherza
Galería Artnueve
Aigua en cistella
ARCOmadrid

Catalogo degli agrumi Real Academia de España en Roma
La construcció del gust
Centre Cultural la Nau

Espacio visceral
Centro Condeduque

El BartolíTodolí Citrus Fundació

Dulcis in fundoReal Academia de España en Roma

Jardín de las deliciasLoewe y AD Spain
Un tiempo espléndidoJardí Botànic de València

El comedor inca San Agustín de Callo (Cotopaxi)
La Lola
Hacienda la Herrería (Quito)


carles@parallelfood.com
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La frutta che scherza

2025
Solo exhibition and gastronomic experience. Porcelain, paper, beeswax, paraffin wax and candle wax. Various techniques and dimensions.

In this exhibition, Carles Tarrassó invites an active spectator to experience the work from the threshold between taste and vision. His artistic practice is grounded in the conviction that gastronomy—the only art form that engages all the senses—is a form of aesthetic thought: a language capable of combining emotion, concept, and experience.

The title of the exhibition, inspired by Helena Attlee’s essay The Land Where Lemons Grow—which traces the cultural history of citrus in Italy—brings together under a single umbrella an artistic practice developed over several years. Tarrassó redraws and brings us closer to the extravagant forms of those bizarre morphologies known in Italian tradition as frutta che scherza: strange, whimsical, or deformed fruits, with unexpected silhouettes that seem to play with nature, depart from the ordinary, and convey a mischievous humour emerging from the very trees that produce them.

The project takes its cue from the great citrus collections of Florence, documented by Bartolomeo Bimbi in his magnificent Baroque still lifes and by the meticulous, hyperrealistic wax models of the Officina ceroplastica fiorentina. Both collections were housed at La Specola, the museum of science and natural history and the first museum in the world to open its doors to the general public.

Focusing on these works of art that reference gastronomy, the artist selects and dissects a series of fruits in order to capture the traces of organic matter: the sinuosity and particularities of the skin, the delicate details of the flesh, and the hidden forms of their interiors. Working with porcelain and wax, he creates his own cabinet of wonders, where the scientific and the aesthetic intertwine.

The coexistence of winter and summer fruits creates a temporal dislocation, a kind of climatic irony: the orange alongside the tomato, the fig alongside the lemon. The fruit “jokes” (scherza), playing with the spectator’s expectations and questioning the idea of what is natural and authentic.

In this proposal, the fruits are transformed into poetic matter, into succulent pieces that can be tasted in an experience that, as a gastronomic performance, completes the journey through the senses. With the figure of the god Janus as a reference—that god of transitions and thresholds—Tarrassó places us between summer and winter, between what is ending and what is beginning.

The tasting is conceived as a drift towards sensory awareness, not only through the five traditional senses described by Aristotle, but also through the more than fourteen senses recognised by modern science, linked to multiple perceptual systems that allow us to experience both the external world and the internal state of the body.

Sensory perception, like our relationship with our bodies, changes throughout life, shaped by every interaction and experience. As Jacques Rancière argues in his essay The Politics of Aesthetics, contemporary art redistributes the sensible—that is, it “reorganises the ways in which the world can be perceived”. In this sense, the exhibition seeks to activate gustatory memory and olfactory imagination as forms of knowledge and aesthetic experience.

Frutta che scherza thus takes shape as a fissure connecting the kitchen and the museum, the orchard and the laboratory, a space where the aesthetics of taste become entangled with aesthetic taste. As Helena Attlee writes, “lemon trees are a boundary between the natural and the manufactured, between the garden and the laboratory”; that boundary is also the territory in which Tarrassó unfolds this project: an intermediate, fertile, luminous place where art can also be eaten, smelled, and remembered.


Joaquín Ruiz Espinosa





Solo exhibition. Space AP1_, ArtNueve gallery, Murcia, Spain
23.10.2025 -  14.11.2025






In october, the coexistence of winter and summer fruits creates a temporal dislocation,
a kind of climatic irony: the orange alongside the tomato,
the fig alongside the lemon.






































A series of fruits, dissected in order to capture the traces of organic matter:
the sinuosity and particularities of the skin, the delicate details of the flesh, and the hidden forms of their interiors.