Rasmus Nilausen : soups & symptoms, paintings 2011-2016

Soups & Symptoms: Paintings 2011–2016 – the result of the Art Nou Prize 2015. The publication includes several miscellaneous writings by Max Andrews. The Cluster III is by no means the only one of Nilausen’s canvases to feature grapes. In his art, bunches of the fruit wonder about painterly realism, and the great degree to which truthfulness and accuracy mattered to the artistic imagination of the Ancient world, through their reference to a legendary competition.
As one of the texts in Soups & Symptoms relates, in Pliny the Elder’s description of a painting contest between the Greek heavyweights Parrhasius and Zeuxis, the latter made an exquisite painting of grapes. Zeuxis “had rendered a glistening bunch of the viniferous fruit in such an astonishingly realistic manner that birds fluttered down to where the picture was displayed.” On the other hand, “the arrogant Parrhasius ... tricked his rival with an image of a curtain so lifelike that Zeuxis thought that the real picture had been hidden behind it.”