“My Salad Years”, the title of Adam Higgins’ first exhibition at the Chris Sharp Gallery, was a hymn to innocence, channeling the happy times that Shakespeare talks about. Antony and Cleopatra (1623), where “green” evokes both youth and lettuce. Yet the artist’s deft, almost photorealistic renditions of salads by the artist – Caesars more precisely, in keeping with the classical theme – belie this, as they suggest a practice of duration and a studied mastery of the devices of painting instead. In any case, Higgins has been working exclusively on this subject for two years. (An iterative body of work from 2019 focused on California halibut and was executed with a similar formal and conceptual approach.) The installation here contained eight oil-on-canvas compositions mounted on varying sized panels, including some were massively, even ridiculously, tall (the tallest was five by six feet). Despite changes in physical and pictorial scale, all shared a cohesive framing device hovering at an indeterminate distance above the carefully composed food that, in the artist’s hands, was rendered unequivocally and viscerally eerie. Caesar Salad with Gulf Shrimp and Red Chard (all 2022 works), for example, featured chopped romaine and darker purple-veined leaves layered with oddly protruding crouton geometries and glistening shrimp, while Caesar salad with chicken and housefly had horribly gelatinous chunks of raw poultry on waxy puddles of vinaigrette.
Evidently commensurate with merchandising strategies and commercial kitchen photography – or its social media counterparts via food porn gurus – the works nevertheless made clear how engaged they are in the stories of the painting (and the preeminent status of the medium in the art market), as well as in the conventions of imagery, of making the world in the order of representation of a given frame. They were sincerely reminiscent of the still life genre, from 17th century Dutch meditations on abundance, consumption and mortality to Édouard Manet’s own self-conscious renditions of white asparagus and shelled oysters. Higgins’ versions image the scenes from above differently, making their shift to the verticality of the wall all the more pronounced. For his part, the artist also names the influence of Jackson Pollock’s allover prints, and there’s some in Higgins’ imagery – vis-à-vis Leo Steinberg’s flatbed plane, but done as a table in a restaurant chain or the generosity of a proud house cook – a link to Pollock’s floor abstractions, always meant to be displayed on the wall.
Higgins’ downward gaze at objects supported, arrayed and rotated under harsh light sometimes obscures his subject, despite the work’s technical prowess. Caesar salad with a piece of pecorino romano is particularly gnomic: flush with the plate (or generalizable, indescribable bowl, counter, or stand) are clean cuts of green drizzled with dressing that alternately oozes and clumps. An aggressively incandescent glowing piece of cheese, a monochromatic obstacle in the center of the painting, delicately rests on top of the whole.
With Caesar salad with lemon wedge, boiled egg and baguette slices, Higgins tilts the table top up and dims the lights. It’s a terribly perverse kind of nocturne. Beneath an indeterminate hue, more intact leaves convey the same mixture of olive oil, egg yolk, peppercorns, garlic and the rest to the sliced bread that awaits. The raw ingredients also remain intact: a cut lemon sits in the upper right corner of the image, with half a hard-boiled egg below. The original Caesar recipe, concocted in Mexico by Italian restaurateur Caesar Cardini, who left the United States during Prohibition, called for lime. However, crossing the nearby Tijuana border meant swapping lime for lemon and, more generally, trivializing the dish while erasing its origins.
It’s tempting to read something about the history and geopolitics of lettuce into Higgins’ props and pose these inanimate objects as bodily substitutes (as anchovy carcasses already are). But this interpretation coexists with the mutability of creamy sauce and paint, and the unshakeable fact of salad as a pretext for formal play. Meyer Schapiro said that realism recreates the world through a “series of abstract calculations of perspective and color gradation”. In this show, Higgins performed as much. In the salad years, you can win on both counts.
