Images of food and eating abound in the history of art. Some even get skewed into formal theory, as in Cezanne. For Miel and Tence Ruiz, both weaned on the unfolding of European image making, Picasso’s 1904 saltimbanque-era The Frugal Repast is a milestone in

micro-history, larger narratives and intimate pockets in the flow of time.

DengCoy and Jose Tence Ruiz both worship at this altar of draughtsmanship, subdued pathos and grimy romance, yet both agreed to take the word Repast to a broader plane; Eating is making–we become what we eat; empires are the result of the countries they gobble up; Capital is the aggregate of profit sucked away, digested and grown from the less able.

War is the corollary of many a dispute of who may eat whom and who may eat what. Energy is an eternal hunger which many repasts must sate. Can we not feed our curiosity, our penchant for malice, our need for recognition, our urge to reach over with several daily meals of social media, rare, medium-rare, even raw or rancid?

While the immediate delicacies that grace our palates and tickle our tongues are forever worthy of new, fresh, pulsating art, the larger notion of entities consuming each other to exist opens up recipes of discourse that can only set our mental salivary glands adrip.

One pattern pops up often: the frugal, the simpler, the humble, the less powerful end up as the repast of the large, wealthy, complex and nutritionally over fortified. This is both pathology and insight, and the artists who feed their imaginations might not want to resist this menu.

Even if that menu is bait in an altogether bigger trap.

— Jose Tence Ruiz