Spanish chef Ferran Adrià, of El Bulli fame, may be known as the maestro in the kitchen bar none, but it is his drawings that are getting their turn in the limelight, thanks to an exhibition opening January 25 at The Drawing Center in New York, “Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity.”
“Drawing is one of the only cross-disciplinary mediums that engineers, architects, writers, artists and typographers employ,” Brett Littman, executive director of The Drawing Center, told BLOUIN Lifestyle. “Everyone can draw something — a line, a diagram, a flowchart — so there’s a kind of universality that I’m extremely interested in, [through the work of] Ferran as an individual. He’s had to come up with a new way of thinking about food to allow him that level of creativity on consistent basis. He developed a visualization technique to get outside the confines of nouvelle cuisine and uses an almost infinite algorithm of ways to combine and create new recipes.”
Littman first broached the idea for an exhibition with Adrià in 2011 and was met with unexpected, unbridled enthusiasm, he said. He made four trips to Barcelona over one and a half years, during which he worked closely with the chef in his archives, poring over thousands of notebooks and documents. The result: a showcase of 586 exhibits providing insight into how Adrià translates ideas to reality from mind to paper to plate.
Both the style and quality of the chef's artwork, which range from black-and-white diagrams to watercolor impressions — will certainly surprise as much as his molecular gastronomy has delighted diners.
As Littman puts it: “It’s not about wonderful drawings of the food; rather, it might be a diagram of ideas, documenting where and how food is placed. Actually, many of the drawings are rather child-like, as if they were some sort of paleontological study, like what cavemen did to cook meat. No other chef would’ve done this as a means of understanding what he does.”
In fact, what Littman found most fascinating in El Bulli’s archives was the “Bullipedia,” which started listing from the 1980s every single product, tool, and plate that would form the system used at El Bulli, the Michelin three-star restaurant in Spain that was ranked for five years running the best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine, until it shut its doors in 2011. The exhibition also explains the “Map of Culinary Process: Decoding the Genome of Cuisine”— the exhaustive classification of foods that Adrià has spent the last three years developing.
According to Littman, the exhibition will travel to MOCA Cleveland in Sept 2014, then on to Minneapolis Institute of Arts in late 2015 and thereafter a museum in Maastricht in 2016.
Click here for a slideshow of some highlights in the exhibition, on at The Drawing Center from January 25 to February 28.
