Sometime during one of those unremarkable post-Christmas pre-New Year’s days I was scrolling Instagram endlessly. In between sponsored health food ads, I came across an installation image of one Adam Higgins’ hyperreal salad paintings at Chris Sharp Gallery. My initial dismissal of the painting as simply more wellness content only furthered my fascination with the work. If I could be fooled into mistaking the painting for a photograph over Instagram, what was its effect in person? And why salad?

Upon finally visiting the exhibition, I was struck by how well the hyperrealism of the works holds up. The paintings are luscious and vibrant—like the crisp, green lettuce on a Big Mac in a McDonalds commercial. And, like a McDonalds commercial, the paintings invite you to come closer, to reach into the frame and take a bite. One painting in particular, Caesar salad with chicken and housefly (2022), held my gaze because of the impressive skill with which the weight and light of each leaf, crouton and cube of chicken were rendered. As I approached the canvas in an attempt to—I’m not sure what exactly, smell the work or touch it maybe—the realism of the painting disappeared into an intricate, dense field of short, blending brushstrokes.

Like the surprise that comes with actually eating McDonalds after seeing a much better-looking product in an ad, I became a victim of these trompe l’oeil paintings. Still stuck on my digital first impression of the paintings, I absentmindedly expected to see the veins of the leaves and the pepper in the Caesar dressing up close before being confronted with the actual construction of the painting itself. In this sense then, Higgins’ paintings are about painting, and he uses a strategic deployment of painting traditions to underscore so.

Adam Higgins, Caesar salad with gulf shrimp and red chard, 2022. Courtesy of Chris Sharp Gallery.

Unlike the Pictures Generation painters who painted appropriated photographs, the salad paintings seem to be of subjects that are in the process of being photographed. For instance, the works Caesar salad with chicken and housefly, Caesar salad with gulf shrimp and red chard, and Caesar salad with pecorino romano lump (all 2022) include elements that seem to reflect a bright, direct light from above, as if the salads are artificially lit with studio lights. One can imagine the food stylists arranging shrimps just so and the lighting techs adjusting the studio lights to perfectly capture the full spectrum of color within the salads. In this way, the artifice of the entire endeavor is left intact. An artifice that is exaggerated once one recognizes that for the most part, the salads depicted are actually pretty gross—if not inedible—interspersed as they are with raw seafood, sweaty cheese, and uncooked chicken.

Though his paintings do belong in the still life tradition, Higgins differs by reorienting our perspective from that of the artist standing in front of their subject to a bird’s eye perspective looking down on it. With this new orientation, the paintings’ source of light becomes difficult to discern. The paintings’ overhead gaze emphasizes this artificiality, and the perspective recalls the countless “foodie” images buried on Instagram. “Phone eats first,” as the saying goes. Eating is deferred in the name of capturing an image of the food—a phenomenon that Higgins enacts through his use of trompe l’oeil. The viewer is beckoned towards a more fully sensuous experience of the paintings’ subject before finally, confronting the nature of painting itself. Higgins is able to utilize paintings’ formal history to wittily explore the cynical use of perpetually deferred desire in advertising and social media.

Adam Higgins: “My Salad Years”
On view through February 4, 2023
Chris Sharp Gallery