Art

Item Description

31"x40" acrylic painting of "Uni; 4:1" on canvas by artist, Hadley Nunes.

The Thirteenth Annual Hawaii Food & Wine Festival's The Art of Food & Wine has become a platform to showcase artists of all mediums—painters, sculptors, mixed media, ceramics, photography, florals and even augmented reality! Feast your eyes, and tastebuds, on culinary works of art inspired by esteemed local artists and up-and-coming creatives.

ABOUT THE PAINTING:

Gathering and assembling flowers for dinner with friends or selecting fresh produce from the farmers market to make a meal are not unlike the way a painter collects their ideas and colors to compose something to delight and intrigue the eyes and intellect. 

Nunes once had the experience of tasting uni fresh from it’s shell on the coast of Hawaii Island near Kealakaua Bay. Ever since then the feeling of place—rugged, hot, coastal, cold refreshing waters, salt, sun, wind, light and shadow—have all been brought back with a bite of uni. The experience of the coal black and spiny fivefold shell being opened to reveal the bright ochre colored interior in sections is part of what makes the memory so visceral. 

After Nunes and Chef Jeffrey Hayashi's first conversation, Hayashi sent Nunes five images of some of his recent and favorite dishes. Each one meticulously designed and beautifully arranged, Nunes was drawn to the bite sized “uni custard glazed in tare.” Quenelle shaped with delicate ridges around the exterior, the umami of color and form was irresistible to my eyes. Nunes began to mix colors in the studio that contained the feeling of “uni” in yellows with red and brown, adding to the palette colors like “tare” in flavors to evoke the texture and seduction of a perfect glaze made from soy sauce, sake, brown sugar and sweet mirin. 

Nunes embedded these richly saturated culinary color mixtures into a free-flowing world of wind, heat, movement, inky shells and salt water expanses that were symbolic of his personal associations with the place and feeling of this slow moving, subterranean, volcanic rock traversing creature. Uni, so perfectly meroir—an ingredient that encapsulates and literally tastes of what makes its home unique. Using a method of geometry across the surface, Nunes determined where and how to present the collection of uni-ness in the open, untethered painted space.

Like a plated dish in which all the ingredients count and add up to something new, this painted abstraction can be viewed as a distillation of the aliveness and beauty of the natural world concentrated into a miniature form meant to nourish and intrigue the senses.

ABOUT HADLEY NUNES:

Hadley Nunes is an artist and educator whose creative practice includes painting, performance and curation. She exhibits internationally and is part of The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation collection in Katonah, New York. Nunes has participated in residencies for both performance and visual art in the United States, France and Japan. She is a Lecturer in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. 

Her studio habits combine methods of intelligence—both conceptual and embodied—with approaches to paint that embrace ambiguity and participate in contemporary and historic gradations between abstraction and figuration. Her paintings operate as symbolic portals that mirror potentials yet unknown across the human/nature dialectic. Through a symbiotic relationship in practice and presentation, she questions the notion that humanity and nature are separate and asks herself (and the viewer) how we might heal through future dialogues of interconnectivity.

Item Special Note

The painting can be viewed at the Art Gallery at Halekulani until November 6, 2023.

Proceeds from this item will be split between the artist (70%) and HFWF (30%), with HFWF's proceeds going towards a scholarship to a fine art student at the University of Hawaii.

Pick up at Halekulani or HFWF office in Honolulu, otherwise shipping charges apply.