In joining sight and taste, our two protagonists invite us to rediscover the original motivations of gastronomy. The eye of the person eating sends things to the mouth and the mouth, in tasting, authorizes the meal. The photos send us back well before our time to our origins. In painting a brutal picture of food, they remind us that we are merely animals and that nourishment is but an act of survival. The primary and essential rhythms of life manifest themselves in Meneau's and Gissinger's images.
Cooking is like painting.
But it is also a danse macabre, making use of the carcass of dead animals, pureed vegetables, juices, of all the eternal cooking techniques that give pleasure to the eater. In addressing the way we eat, our two tablemates are redefining the love of food. It has nothing to do with sustenance or nutrition, or with the compulsive delirium of the consumer. Meneau and Gissinger present the gourmet as a philosopher-aesthete who, unsatisfied with the merely visible, commits himself and his palette to an overall aesthetic experience. In eating, he unites art and flesh.