Some ideas are just too good to die and so it is with pasta art. Our own Master of Pasta was John Hurrell back in the early eighties. Hurrell would painstakingly pick out the letters from packets of alphabet soup and build them into texts, many of them from the art world, on paintings. Sticking the noodly letters to the surface with acrylic fixative he skewered the pretentions, boosterism and purple prose of critics and writers. He even managed to find a purple passage in Contemporary New Zealand Painters (an all but impossible task as any fair reader would tell you) and make it the subject of one of these pasta paintings.
Twenty years later pasta is back on the boil in the work of American
Scott Reeder who has also reached out to the pasta soup alphabet.
Images: Scott Reeder paintings at the Lisa Cooley Gallery in NY. You can see an example of John Hurrell’s pasta work here in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery
