Jonathan Monk: “Il Solito” Restaurant Drawings

There is a thread connecting Jonathan Monk’s work to Pasticceria Rizzardini: the shop as a space for direct, unmediated human interaction.

Rizzardini has resisted the touristification that has turned so many corners of the city into self-referential stage sets. Here, the counter, the pastries on display, and the gestures of those serving and buying preserve the intimacy of a transaction between people who recognise one another. This is very much in the spirit of Monk’s first illustrated receipts, which he began posting on Instagram in October 2015: not a shop window, but a direct channel, capable of bypassing the gallery system and restoring an immediate relationship between the artwork and those who desire it.

Showing this series here rather than in a gallery means returning the work to its natural context: small-scale commerce, the artisan shop, the cash payment made at the counter. Here, between one coffee and the next, art becomes once again what it was before turning into an investment: an object bought simply because you like it, for the price of a lunch, as naturally as ordering your usual.