Ahhhhh, the Good Old Days

I have a bit of an issue with self-restraint. I often feel overrun by my indulgent habits. “Bon vivant” is the polite term for this. “Glutton” is maybe more honest, even though I’d like to think of myself more as a Brillat-Savarin than a Tarrare type. Tasmanian painter Rob O’Connor is playing right into these terribly guilty habits of mine in the epicurean decadence of his show at Four Eight Four: Ahhhhh, the Good Old Days.

O’Connor has made a name for himself with paintings of meat. The artist courted controversy when his 2020 work Somewhere Near Oatlands won that year’s Glover Prize; the defacement of Glover’s beloved golden paddocks with a giant, succulent roast, complete with peas and mash, proved too much for conservative circles. The postcolonial message naturally didn’t help—the clearing and fencing of land for sheep farming having been a key driver of the invasion and expansion of Tasmania (and the rest of the country). One almost cannot see the landscape for the juicy joint; greed is in the way.

And here we are in Carlton North, far from the Tasmanian midlands and yet back in the meat market. There are two loose thematic groups in this exhibition. The first—with a particularly meaty focus—is heralded by a large hand-painted sign in blue, red, and white attached to the gallery’s façade that declares the building as “LYGON FOOD STORE.” This sign reappears again in a small painting of the same name, depicting a cavernous delicatessen, overflowing with smallgoods and colossal cheese wheels. Lygon Food Store (2025) is joined on the wall by two tronies: a tiny study of an old-school butcher, and a polite, Pasolini-esque boy holding a chicken. A picture of a butcher’s window is defaced by graffiti (in what looks like pig’s blood) reading “SPRING 1883”; the work is entitled Super Market or Fuuuuuuuuuck Spring Art Fair until they invite me to show. I am reminded of Jules-Antoine Castagnary’s warning to the Parisian establishment after the Salon des Refusés of 1853: “They (still life painters) are multiplying at an alarming rate. The rats in the Paris sewers are less numerous and less menacing. If the academic order ever crumbles, it will be because the still-life painters, down below, have gnawed away, one by one, at its foundations.” In my books, the sooner the asinine decorative adulation of the Spring industrial complex crumbles, the better; still lifes were not the medium I saw this happening through, but one can only hope…

This group of paintings is capped off by what is perhaps the conceptual lynchpin of the exhibition, a copy of Pieter Aertsen’s A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms (1551): the back of the painting reveals a fleshy mess of what looks like pulverised organ meat, bloody, almost dripping. This support, in the presence of a group of works so influenced by the Dutch Golden Age, acts as a potent metaphor for the dark, colonial underbelly of that empire, reminding us of the exploitative, bloody source of the mountains of wealth that gave the era its name. Aertsen was the godfather of the culinary still lifes that so characterised seventeenth-century Dutch painting, and perhaps, by extension, that of the food staging that infects wannabe cooking influencers’ social media feeds today. O’Connor has translated some of the symbols in this work for a modern audience. For example, the sign in the work’s upper right (advertising tracts of dispossessed convent land for instant disposal) that Aertsen deployed to warn against the sins of Antwerp’s unscrupulous burghers is transformed by O’Connor to simply read “Fire Sale.” If I were to list the number of times an underhand land deal has occurred in Tasmania—or, for that matter, in Melbourne—even just over the last five years, I could fill the rest of this review and then some more for good measure. But I digress. Greed!

These paintings—with the exception of Tronie 1 – Polite Chicken Boy—are all encased in a glossy layer of resin. I’m relieved that resin “craft” no longer seems to be an appropriate source of income for log-table makers or Etsy bibelot merchants; those years of the early twenties when one was constantly assaulted with garish videos of liquid epoxy poured and moulded into some of the most hideous objects imaginable are thankfully over. Although I do not count O’Connor among these charlatans (I am not sure whether he has ever even made an Instagram reel), these works do remind me of the scary permanence of that landfill-destined material. There is something deeply unsettling in the combination of the fleshy tactility of the meat in these works, destined otherwise to be eaten or to rot, and the sheen of the resin that permanently preserves them.

O’Connor has picked an opportune moment for deli-gazing. As fellow Carltonites (and sundry Age readers) will know well, Donati’s butcher, considered by many the last bastion of real Italian culture on Lygon Street, announced its closure late last year, swiftly acquired by the Valmorbida family of King and Godfreys et al. To paraphrase Denny Baring, co-proprietor of the Queensberry St. Co-op, the proliferation of third-wave “Italian” venues on Lygon Street—signified by their Nonna-laden iconography, nonsensical Instagram-fed fusion offerings, and a generally phoney corporate presence (the brick veneer is particularly troublesome)—has got this end of town’s food culture in a stranglehold. Everyone has heard the grumblings of older Mediterranean Australians about the decline and fall of Lygon Street’s authenticity: the same conversations amongst well-heeled twenty-somethings can often be overheard in Northcote, Thornbury, or Brunswick concerning the demise of their old haunts in Fitzroy and Collingwood (so passé!). One can’t help but wonder whether the arrival of Hector’s Deli on the scene will sound the death knell for the strip, especially amidst some of the lowest foot traffic it has ever faced… Pieter Aertsen’s warning against property developers and their pernicious ilk has not left my mind.

But, as O’Connor makes clear, ripping us out of our salami-laden reverie, more often than not when we complain about gentrification, we feel nostalgic for something that never really existed. This is—perversely—also the faux nostalgia that fuels the persistent, gaudy “Italian” signifiers of Lygon Street’s restaurants, nouveau and established alike. The revolutionary impact the first waves of Mediterranean grocers and delis had on food culture in Melbourne and Australia more broadly is a well-known story. Michael Hyde describes the general alarm shown towards the culinary habits of the first Carlton bohemians, people who—quelle horreur—“cooked beef casseroles with red wine and small black things called olives, ate European rye bread with caraway seeds, and bought six different kinds of cheese from the Prahran market.” I am not sure what the (even remotely transgressive) equivalent would be to the sharehouser of the twenties; Nagi Maehashi, bless her soul, does not count.

It is interesting in this context, then, that the remaining group of works in the show demonstrates the opposite side of Australian cuisine to this saintly Mediterranean liberation. We have never been a nation known for our great cuisine: despite the best efforts of such luminaries as Margaret Fulton, Charmaine Solomon, and later on Stephanie Alexander, last century in most Anglo-Australian kitchens was one characterised by the long Victorian shadow of Isabella Beeton and the unassailable standard of “meat and three veg.” We have never had an M. F. K. Fisher, an Elizabeth David, even a Julia Child to truly and decisively elevate our palates. In the large-scale paintings on the remaining two walls of the gallery, O’Connor meticulously reproduces cookbook photography of the seventies and eighties. Particularly prescient in my books is Ahhhhh the Good Old Days (for Phil Wymant), a work showing an assemblage of preserves in jars laid out on a farm table in a sickeningly pastoral setting. In The Mushroom Tapes, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, and Sarah Krasnostein discuss the prestige factor that remains associated with these Anglo cooking ideals in rural communities (i.e., beef wellington)—a factor intrinsically connected with the persistence of the registers of colonial cuisine. These are the sorts of meals one could imagine the protagonist of Murnane’s The Plains being served up on those anachronistic estates that dot the Western District, transcribed by the photographer Phil Wymant for a national (and nationalist) audience sick with nostalgia for Patterson and Roberts. The other works are no less gaudy in their colours and odd combinations. Preserves (2025) shows another assemblage of jars, topped with a sausage floating in midair and surrounded by an assortment of terribly fecund apricots, apples, and pears. Though the painting is darker than the pastoral scene, there’s a crepuscular shadow in the windows—the tower seen in the background of Aertsen’s Meat Stall. Another work, Cross (2025), sits on the wall with the “Dutch” paintings, but is more at home with these latter pictures. It shows a chi-shaped decussate cross—the same composition as the fish, sausages, and trotters in the Aertsen—made from two ornate skewers, upon which are threaded chunks of tinned peach, sausage, cocktail onions, and spam… Maybe this is the ultimate joy of these paintings, and the photography that they derive from: that they manage to make even the most revolting combinations look incredibly tempting.

Overland Vision on St Lucy’s Day (2025) is perhaps the most miraculous of these retro cookbook pictures. A ghastly assemblage of sausage, tinned pineapple, tomatoes, lettuce, and fried eggs float in the sky, bordered at the base of the painting by a view of the mountains of Tasmania’s Central Plateau. The contrast between the sensitive subtlety of the landscape and the crass decadence of the food couldn’t be sharper. Saint Lucy had her eyes gouged out before she was martyred; O’Connor also mentions in his statement Jacob’s biblical deception of his blind father Isaac, shrouding himself in goatskin to appear as his voluptuously hirsute older brother Esau. It is no surprise that Ribera’s version of the story, with its moody, torturous light and voluptuous texture, is that which O’Connor is most attracted to. Thinking about Ribera and saints, my mind wanders to his striking picture in the NGV collection, The Martyrdom of St Lawrence (1620–24), in which a gridiron is being prepared to grill the poor saint alive. It is a hagiographical delight, then, that Overland Vision is joined on the wall with a work called Gridiron (2025), a tableau of a barbeque ready to be fired up. Again, in Overland Vision I observe the same tactics as Somewhere Near Oatlands; the sheer explosive, dominating quality of the food assemblage floating in the roughly textured sky pushes the landscape to the margins, like some sort of hungry bushwalker’s Fata Morgana.

In the proliferation of haptic decadence in this show—the silicone flesh of the Aertsen, the mirror-smooth finish of the resin-coated paintings, the beautiful, fertile curves of flesh and fruit—I realise the triumph of appearance over truth that so concerns the painter. Preservation and greed prevail in this sybaritic false nostalgia of concocted cookbooks and phantastical delicatessens, Golden Age types, and an ever-present tension between the succulent and the revolting. Recalling Castagnary’s warning and reflecting on the number of purposefully abstruse shows of “Melbourne art” I’ve seen since the start of the year, I wonder whether it would do us all good if there were more straight-talking still lifes around, especially ones of this calibre. On the way to the pub after the show, a friend and I passed a persimmon tree, dripping with orange fruit that would not have been misplaced in one of O’Connor’s paintings. We couldn’t help ourselves, splitting one in half there and then; even though the irony was strong, who would we be to say no when life offers up pleasures of the flesh?