All You Can Eat is a series of paintings made by Possollo to explore the relationship between taste, sensuality and eroticism. The paintings are titled Acid, Bitter, Metallic, Pungent, Salty, Sweet, and Umami.
Here is the artist’s own statement on the exhibit:
Of all our senses, taste is probably the one through which we establish the most intimate relationship with the world. We realise what things taste of when, in a primordial communion, we introduce them into our mouths. We make what we taste our own, either through simple exploration, or by swallowing and digesting it so that it becomes an integral part of ourselves.
Our need to feed, and the predatory way in which we are forced to do so, have dominated our evolution for hundreds of millions of years. We daily partake in this blessed or cursed alchemical ceremony of ingesting something which is alien to us to make it our very own.
The mouth, and particularly the tongue, is the organ in which the process begins and in which it is most stimulating. A whole universe of expectations is transformed when we finally taste what we had only observed through sight and touch. It may work in concourse with touch; it may, indeed, be a visceral form of touch which generates complete interpenetration and develops a particularly strong network of connections which are bound to our own physiology.
The mouth, the second embryological opening to develop in humans, is a magical place. Through it we attempt to control foods by chewing and are made most vulnerable to their effects on our body or on our mind. It is an area of tension between the self and the other. The mouth is intrinsically linked to sex, a place of strife and interaction where pleasure is given and received. It is striking that such a rich and complex organ is so exposed, and that we constantly open it to the world to kiss, to speak, to eat, or to sigh. It is an organ of total promiscuity that we use for everything, simultaneously allowing us to communicate and to devour, to kiss and to bite.
My installation project focuses on the seven tastes which are traditionally detected by the tongue – sour, bitter, sweet, salty, pungent, metallic, and umami. Each of these principles is enacted by a group of intimately interwined figures exploring one another in various ways.
I stress the connection of the mouth and the tongue with sex, and its role as an organ which is primarily centred on pleasure, hence the figuration of the genital anatomy which actively appears in the scenes. My aim is to reflect on the total continuity between all things linked to libido, the universal principle which unfolds and materialises in ever-changing ways to each of us. Based on the theory that our lives are immersed in a vast ocean of libido, from which emancipation is extremely difficult and would entail the risk of annihilation, I explore some of the erotic variations of the extraordinary experiences our mouths can bring us.