Inspiration, thoughts and ideas behind We eat with our eyes first

On Friday 2 September 2011, Nicolas Party hosted “Dinner for 24 Elephants” at The Modern Institute. The invited guests ate a seven-course meal designed by the artist that included: a single oyster; a fish; a sausage and a poached pear. Each dish was presented on a plate, painted by Party and each guest sat on a stool and at a table painted by Party. The event reflected and animated the familiar vocabulary found in Party’s drawings and paintings. The plates, stools and tables have now been installed Upstairs at The Modern Institute.

Painting is the starting point for all Nicolas Party’s works. Applying colour to different surfaces – paper, canvas, walls and objects – allows him to produce a range of work from paintings to site-specific installations. Typically producing still-life and landscape paintings, Party utilises a regular vocabulary of figurative elements – pots, food, mountains and trees – interpreted using the tropes of cubes, cylinders, cones, spheres and pyramids. Using this consistent formal language, he makes a hierarchy of decorative patterns, resulting in frieze-like paintings, which are concurrently representational and fantastical. These works repeatedly interrogate the language of forms central to his practice.

- Mousse Magazine