“I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings”

Claes Oldenburg, “I Am For…” (1961)

“¿Usted Qué Come Qué Adivina?”: its closest English translation coming to “what are they feeding you that you see so well,” meant in earnest astonishment or mocking jest, dependent on delivery and context. “Adivina”: is not mere sight, but divination, a scrying, extra-sensory vision that, following the logic of the phrase, is granted to the seer by the food she eats. The conceit underlying “¿Usted Qué Come Qué Adivina?”: to eat is to know. In her exhibition of the same name, opening at Charlie James Gallery on June 3rd, Lucia Hierro unpacks this mythic entanglement of cuisine, knowledge, and consumption across a terrain of takeout orders and home kitchen accoutrements, charting in the process the role food plays in making and unmaking a sense of home.

If eating is knowing, then the works in ¿Usted Qué Come Qué Adivina? offer a conceptual bulwark to complete understanding- see “White Rice (Take-Out)”, as bare and impenetrable as a Ryman canvas; or “To Go Bag,” a floor-standing brown-bag pyramid that keeps viewers closed out of the promised food inside. These are not well-manicured beauty shots: takeout beans bubble, a pot sits soaking in soap water in “Cleaning”, and ingredients lie disassembled across “Orange Marmalade” – its final form tantalizingly unfinished. For Lucia, whose work has long mined the particularities of her Dominican identity and her home in Manhattan, this opacity is part of a continuing conceptual turn against a mainstream that flattens, consumes, then discards cultures as it sees fit, leaving histories and contexts crumpled like so many GrubHub receipts. 

The scale of Lucia’s work plays a key part in reinforcing her newfound opacity. Her practice has long centered on making monuments to the domestic mundane- in turning foodstuffs and tchotchkes into massive tableaux in the vein of the great Pop prodigy Tom Wesselmann. In ¿Usted Qué Come Qué Adivina?, though, these everyday subjects are increasingly set free from their place in the picture plane, instead floating unmoored as oversized objects unto themselves. There is an intentional dearth of visual and situational context to works like the “Takeout” series or the massive pair of aprons which measure more than six feet tall each. These works connote specific contexts and yet remain intimidatingly, almost overwhelmingly impenetrable.

¿Usted Qué Come Qué Adivina? is a celebration, yes, of food, flavor, and domestic labor; it is also a safeguard of the knowledge required of those things: “if you don’t know, you’ll never know”.

-Text by Justin Ka