Art historian David Pablo has written the following text about the exhibition:

Everyone instinctively seeks pleasure. For millennia, human beings have found joy in physical contact and in social ritual. The act of gathering around a table is associated with an awakening of the senses and with the bond that, as social animals, we establish with “the other.” There is an almost choreographic behaviour, a rhythm in itself, in the act of (good) eating. This vitalist impulse runs through the work presented by Marta Leyva (Barcelona, 1985), who champions universal and shared pleasure beyond gender, age, sexual orientation, identity, or race.

This utopia bursts forth in a universe that juxtaposes elements of the domestic and traditional culinary landscape with luxury products, allowing them to engage in a dialogue that asserts the right to daily, unrestrained, chaotic, Dionysian pleasure. In this way, Leyva elevates the objects of our everyday lives into the realm of beauty and transforms them into instruments of ultimate pleasure, proposing a reflection on the revaluation of what we consume daily with both our mouths and our eyes. Like still life paintings drenched in acid, pop aesthetics, and abundant human presence.

The existence of the mundane amid grand banquets and Dionysian feasts also serves as a pretext for discussing the darker side of consumption, the artifice to which we are condemned, and the dynamics hidden behind large-scale production industries. It also speaks of that spiral that keeps us in a perpetual state of desire—always incomplete, always unsatisfied—that governs the rhythm of our habits and even our human relationships (or perhaps we could call them “acquisitions”). Hence the presence of bodies that consume and also seem willing to be consumed.

Through all of this, Leyva plays and presents herself as a passive subject of consumption, in an exercise of irony that sets the humorous and carefree tone of her works. When she is not painting, the artist consumes humour. And it is that gesture, that knowing smile, that she would like to see in the viewer contemplating her works, understanding humour as a place of common ground.

To speak about eating is to speak about interaction, class, culture, and other ways of thinking. Eating is a political act; it is falling headlong into the spiral of capitalism. It is an act of love in Catalan culture. It is a language for communicating the most intimate things without words. It is an act of identity, one that defines our likes and dislikes, our beliefs and our tastes. It is an erotic act; it is the making of community; it is a mirror-act, as it defines how we present ourselves to the world.