Ruan D'Ornellas — Lanche é lanche

The chess tables in the squares of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro are often crossed by ants. Those who want to play sometimes have to shoo them away from the boards, since it is there that they cleverly search for that last sweet trace of guaraná or the crunchy grains of farofa that fell at the moment we bit into a skewer. One must be careful when gathering the disposable items someone forgot to throw into the already overflowing trash bins of plates, cans, and coconuts: if we are not attentive, we may end up throwing ants away as well, as they hide among the folds of the crumpled bags of already

devoured hot dogs.

It is not surprising that, in many of these squares, we see more people eating than playing at these concrete tables with painted chessboards. Strategically, the city’s barbecue carts park beside them and sometimes establish long-standing gastronomic traditions, also joined by French fries and hamburger carts, churros, pastel, boiled corn, popcorn, and other delights, reminding us that it was not the shopping mall that invented the “food court.”

In every corner of a city like Rio de Janeiro — in squares, beaches, subway stations, bus stops, school gates — a sociability that resists the scarcity of poverty and hunger, the threat of real estate speculation and gentrification is sustained and reinvented daily. From daybreak — when vendors of coffee, pão de queijo, and Globo biscuits strategically position themselves at train station entrances or weave themselves between motorcycles and cars on expressways like Linha Vermelha— to the end of the workday, when the orange glow of streetlights illuminates carts selling sandwiches, yakisoba, tapioca, açaí, or pastel, food producers and sellers irrigate the urban fabric with doses of affection, alliance, and complicity in the midst of each person’s hustle.

And, as senseless as it may seem, there are those who dare to call this rich culinary culture “low gastronomy.” In the prejudiced eyes of many who observe the culinary art of the streets from the closed windows of air-conditioned restaurants, these food practices are deemed reprehensible by arguments that are deeply elitist, which — neglecting the social, urban, and racial implications of this popular culinary heritage — reduce the debate to issues of nutrition or hygiene. As a famous meme says, if “ecology without class struggle is gardening,” nutrition without food justice is certainly calorie-counting.

As an art worker always on the move, Ruan D’Ornellas began to carefully observe his own food culture, transferring some

hours of his interest in painting, ceramics, drawing, or exhibitions to trailers, snack bar display cases, trash bins, and street 

vendors’ carts. If it seems inevitable that, as a painter, Ruan would be drawn to the textures, colors, compositions, and rhythms of this gastronomic universe, the works gathered in Lanche é lanche reveal that it was also as a conservator-restorer that the artist came to engage with drumsticks, coxinhas, guaravitas, coffees, cachaças, pizzas, grilled cheeses, boiled eggs, cakes, and ketchups.

A painting graduate from the School of Fine Arts at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (2013), it is worth noting that, at this same institution, Ruan D’Ornellas developed an interest in the field of conservation, continuing the restoration studies he had previously begun at the National Library. This is by no means an innocuous piece of information, but an important key to reading the work of this artist, whose deep interest lies in the crafts of manual making. Virtuous in techniques such as painting, ceramics, and drawing, Ruan is not merely a specialist in certain artistic languages, but a devoted scholar of the materialities and physical-chemical processes of life: from goldsmithing to mineralogy, from botany to tattooing, from anatomy to textiles. His political and ethical awareness of materialities inscribe his artistic practice within the vast history of artisan traditions that, in his recent exhibition, unfold as an investigation into the practices of popular cuisine.

Making a coxinha, a ceramic sculpture, or a chessboard converge in Lanche é lanche. In his encounter with the street food culture, Ruan D’Ornellas doubles down on his belief in the intelligence of manual craftsmanship, combining the know-how of a good deep fry with the knowledge that constitutes a well-made painting. There is, in this gesture, no technicist celebration of art, but rather a politicization of techniques and materials that aestheticization tends at times to hollow out. After all, form without a historical-political consciousness of technique is branding.

In this sense, as already announced by the recursive and tautological title of the exhibition, one of Ruan D’Ornellas’s operations in Lanche é lanche is to play with mimesis. As an artist whose training included the practice of restoration, his relationship to the idea of the “original” becomes an important force in this body of work. If, on the one hand, the naturalist vocation of his painting touches on discussions of the role of art in relation to the referentiality of the “real,” on the other, it is especially in the ceramics and other objects in the show that we see Ruan create through mimicry. Emulating the metallic sheen of food display cases and/or the concrete solidity of chess tables, the artist combines materials such as styrofoam, ceramics, and spray paint to theatrically pretend that his works are like popular cuisine, even when presented in the artistic

equivalent of air-conditioned restaurants — the white cube.

Palm-heart pastels initially modeled in clay, later fired in ceramic kilns and then painted with metallic paint, allude to the chromed aesthetics that inhabit the capitalist imaginary of additive or luxury practices and products — the persistent shine

of the coin, the “breakfast of champions”, the celebration of the machine or of icons of art or fashion, the frames of chairs designed by Mies van der Rohe, the metal chains hanging from Chanel bags… Commodified as art, coxinhas are not merely aestheticized by Ruan D’Ornellas. More than that, betraying ontologically what they appear to be from the point of view of the image, his sculptural snacks transform the technical nuances of their own making into a political stance within art. To create his trap of appearances, the artist learns from the tensions produced by the snack economy in the face of the bourgeois monopoly of the means of production: McDonald’s faces a tough fight against the French fries of Marechal Hermes.

We are thus faced with an artist whose virtuosic mastery in dealing with the intoxicating beauty of materials, colors, forms, and compositions is not escapist in nature but, on the contrary, constitutes a political position in itself. While the second half of the last century saw the emergence of an art that praised the social standardization of capitalism through industrialized food — epitomized by Andy Warhol’s statement that “a Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke” — by rekindling manual labor and crafts between art and food, Ruan D’Ornellas turns his artistic practice into an investigation of rights and access to social technologies. Lanche é lanche thus becomes a stage for debates such as the right to the city, food security, and health, prompting us to value, but also to learn to differentiate, the unmatched flavor of the green mayonnaise of the “snack lady” from her daily hustle and precariousness.

Especially because - it is worth remembering - to be at the gates of Mackenzie College at 7 am, this “lady” woke up at 4 am to mix the herbs into her famous sauce, left her home in Saracuruna at 5 am, and crossed Gramacho, Duque de Caxias, Vigário Geral, and Penha on a SuperVia train that takes her to Central Station, where she catches subway line 1 to arrive already exhausted in Botafogo, carrying her griddle, cooler, sauces, bread, cheese, and the characteristic smell of garlic that announces the green mayonnaise that, over the years, has become the favorite of students in Rio de Janeiro’s South Zone.

It is in light of this reality that Ruan D’Ornellas provocatively states that Lanche é lanche. Meanwhile, in the depths of many of our memories, in response to the humorous title of his exhibition, echoes the popular wisdom that does not allow us to unlearn how to distinguish and singularize those and that whose abyssal experience of social inequality does not yet authorize us to face life under the aesthetic-political flattening of regimes that claim equality, even if only that of digestion. As immortalized in É o Pente (Sequência do Pente), “betrayal is betrayal, romance is romance, love is love, and a fling is a fling”.

Clarissa Diniz