In But Is It With the Pistachios?, Abbi Kenny approaches the imagery of food with a collector’s precision and a painter’s curiosity for transformation. Revisiting a vintage cookbook photograph of mortadella—its surface flecked with pale fat and pistachio green—she reimagines the slice as both object and portal. Inspired by the theatrical excess of Salvador Dalí’s Les Dîners de Gala, Kenny turns this humble luncheon meat into a vivid frame for a surreal landscape: a tower rising against an electric blue sky above a plate of pasta and cold cuts.

Over the course of several weeks, she layered and reworked the composition, experimenting with collage, texture, and mineral pigments until the surface achieved its tactile shimmer. The result is a playful meditation on taste, artifice, and visual pleasure—an ode to the strange beauty of the everyday and the alchemy of painterly transformation.