Exhibited since October in the new and very beautiful space at the Rabouan Moussion Gallery, the two self-portraits of the artist with spittle on his lips and bulging eyes, raging at the 7th January attacks resonate with an even more unsettling acuity today. Faced with the eternal question of what an artist can do after the shock of such events, Erwin Olaf responds with art, i.e. the sensitive embodiment of his contradictory feelings. His tense body seems hampered, his deformed face gagged. Hatred, pain, fear, violence and powerlessness… “I was devastated, and at the same time incapable of crying,” confided the artist in September. “It was the first time I did self-portraits that talk, not just about me, but about the global situation. I didn’t know how to react. But I was too angry to just do nothing. These two photos are exactly what they are: an almost instinctive reaction, primal emotions in the face of horror. But it won’t stop me from continuing to celebrate freedom and to continue working.”.

His exhibition “Waiting”, on until November 28th, is visual proof. It includes – as well as these two self-portraits – two sides to the artist’s work, one is autobiographical and the other dedicated to sophisticated mises en scène. Both are interested in the human condition, from the vulnerability of simply being to the relationship between power and submission. In the first room are self-portraits. Erwin Olaf has confronted himself with this method for many years, recording the changes in his body brought about by time and illness [the artist suffers from a respiratory disease]. We see the very advertising-esque aesthetic of his photographs, the glossy colours and perfect light. The Dutchman earnt his stripes in that domain and continues – although more rarely – to contribute to campaigns orchestrated by major brands. Above all we recognise, since his series of the 90s to the 2000s, his ability to stylise, often to the max. His portraits rival the great Flemish masters from Vermeer to Rembrandt, to whom he is compared with a reflex that’s almost too Pavlovian.  

The ambiguity of such an aesthetic is revealed to its full extent in the second and much bigger room of the Rabouan Moussion Gallery. Large scale photographs, as he likes them to be, along with two videos projected onto screens facing each other, give the exhibition its title: “Waiting”. Erwin Olaf captures women, of all origins, in profile in wide shots or in close-ups, but always they are waiting. In what we imagine to be a hotel lobby, or a restaurant, these women wait patiently, unperturbed… well almost. The whole force of this installation comes from this sense of ‘almost’. Is it deception in their eyes? Impatience in that rictus? Hope in that gaze? As the visit continues the questions multiply because we’ve all experienced these types of situations.

Numéro: In what way was Pierre Paulin, from his earliest works, a visionary designer?

Benjamin Paulin:  My father was born in France in 1927. He grew up and took his first steps as a designer here, but he quickly realised that French design hadn’t evolved with modernity. Furniture wasn’t adapted, at least in terms of size, according to habitations and new post-war lifestyles. He was even more conscious of this after his trip to Scandinavia in 1951 where design was being completely revolutionised. Discovering editors who had already taken into account this modernity in motion, such as Knoll and Herman Miller (of which American designer George Nelson was made director of design in 1945), also played a major part in his approach. However his willingness to adapt French design to the era wasn’t done in an iconoclastic way, he didn’t erase all traces of the past. On the contrary, my father wanted to take what existed into the future. 

Isn’t the futurist aspect of his work dated?

His vision of the future has actually become something of a classic. The furniture my father made during the 1960s, in tune with the future as perceived at the time, still fits in with our current perceptions. So you’ll see pieces by my father in films like Avengers or Iron Man used to symbolise a “futuristic” interior. And I think that tour de force comes from the fact he wasn’t seeking a purified gesture or aesthetic. His work was always about solid technical research. The aesthetic always came as a result of technique and, of course, the vision of the person who makes it their own. 

We often think of his work as restricted to the 1960s but Pierre Paulin’s oeuvre is much more eclectic than that. What were the most important creative periods in your father’s life?

He’s even been labelled a pop designer although he never saw himself as part of that movement, or any movement for that matter. He questioned his work throughout his life. In the 1950s he was mostly interested in wood, inspired by Scandinavian and American designers, all while adding his own poetry, finesse and lightness. Then at the end of the 1950s he discovered Stretch fabrics that allowed him to compose new shapes for a dozen or so years. They became more organic, the feet are no longer visible… Then he became interested in modularity, of which Ensemble Dune and the Tapis-Sièges being shown at the Perrotin Gallery are fine examples. Everyone can combine different elements, assemble and take them apart at will, and becoming as a result the architects of their own interior. Then he started down a new path by getting seriously involved with industrial production. He modernised everyday objects like the iron where he put a water reserve into the handle. He spent 15 years creating like this. Finally, and this is undoubtedly the least known period of his oeuvre, my father went back to a more traditional and artisanal production focusing on noble materials. He revisited the classics with his own modern vision. From this final “classic” period, the gallery is showing the extraordinary Cathédrale table of 1981 that aligns engineering with the curves of gothic architecture. My father saw this as his masterpiece. This was also the time when he decided to do, particularly for his exhibition at the Arts décoratifs in 1983, limited edition pieces, even though democratisation and industrialisation were all the rage. It was a commercial disaster. And yet he was at the forefront of what’s happening today. 

The cast of a Hedi Slimane menswear show lost inside dreamy landscapes with a fin de siècle aesthetic… This sort of anachronistic evocation and fantastical encounter has always populated the paintings of Hernan Bas ever since they started appearing at the cusp of the 2000s. When the artist showed his exhibition “Slim Fast” in Miami, his style was instantly recognisable. In stark contrast to the exaggerated virility typically celebrated in the capital of Florida, this artist fills his canvases – which appear suspended in time – with neurasthenic dreamers and homo-erotic modern-day dandies. His inspiration, he acknowledges, also comes from fashion magazines – particularly when Hedi Slimane was thrusting a new masculinity into the limelight with its slight physique and gaunt features, far from the canons of beauty of the 1990s. Hernan Bas also embodies an element of the zeitgeist with this return to figurative painting. He’s used it to plunge ever deeper into the worlds of Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe with references to classical painting. The artist leaves Miami for Detroit and while abstract painting floods the art marker, his works continues to garner interest.  This is probably due to his success in bringing his landscapes, portraits and surreal, bucolic interiors into new lands. Now the works have become denser, more experimental, mixing up figurative and abstraction… With a more complex renewed vocabulary – for the first time he’s showing still lifes with something of a 19th century peep show about them – Hernan Bas continues to tell stories, like so many dreams, filled with enigmatic ambiguity.

Numéro: The show "Fruits and Flowers" on at the Galerie Perrotin until December 19th marks a notable evolution in your oeuvre. Why stop the literary references?

Hernan Bas: For the last two years I’ve become more interested in painting itself, in the way that Matisse worked his motifs for example, but also in Pierre Bonnard. His paintings, showing scenes from daily life (children in the park, women taking their bath), helped my approach to evolve. I wanted to tell my own stories. So instead of drawing sources for my tableaux from literature, I turned to the ordinary day-to-day of a rural America, kids hanging out (a pie eating contest, apple bobbing…). I feel this puts my paintings into present time. 

This is also the first time you’re showing a series of still lifes, completely unheard of in your work.

I started developing this passion for still lifes, floral in particular, and the way they’ve been viewed over the years. Finally I decided to have a go myself. I went to the market; I bought flowers, very traditional bouquets… And of course the result was way too classic (laughs)! Too simple. Too easy. So then I came up with the idea of covering them with a blind. I didn’t want to make them disappear either; I’d spent way too long painting them! So you end up with this game of disclosure and concealment… The paintings changed their nature and turned into a sort of peep show (laughs).

Did you want to deflower your paintings?

I realised that flowers have this very powerful erotic charge. We immediately think of Mapplethorpe’s photographs… The flower as the symbol of the female sex. But the flowers themselves are also incredibly sexual. Look at the way they reproduce, in this cross over way, as they share the pollen between them… 

Some of your paintings contain abstract motifs. Have you never been tempted to follow the wave of abstraction that’s been sweeping the art world for the last few years?

The abstract elements in my painting correspond with the moment when I wanted to have fun with them (laughs). There was a time, maybe six or seven years ago, when I did think about going abstract. And then it just never happened. And I don’t regret it because that’s what everyone else does now. I feel like that’s all I ever see.

You seem generally more interested in classical European art history than the major American movements of the 20th century.

I was born in 1978 in Miami, and believe me art certainly did not reign supreme back then. The Miami Art Basel fair didn’t exist yet. There were much fewer museums. Failing to find any interest in my immediate surroundings I tuned to the great European masters. I would have much preferred to spend a day at the Louvre than at MoMA. I didn’t feel any particular affinity with pop art or the minimalism that have such prominent status in the States. I was always more interested by the idea of telling stories. You could say that abstract expressionism tells stories too… but personally they never struck me as very obvious (laughs). 

Gather two bodies that attract each other irresistibly, create a cocoon of images around them, and maintain them in this Eden for as long as possible − cinema sometimes displays a radical and heart-rending simplicity. It’s this candour that director Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine, 1998, Far From Heaven, 2002) is aiming for in his sixth feature, Carol, the most beautiful big-screen romance in years. A story about love and social constraints that moved audiences at this year’s Festival de Cannes, and conjures up a rhapsodic 1950s America through an adaptation of a 1952 Patricia Highsmith novel that was originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. An ode to lyricism, both in life and on screen, which stands out in comparison to today’s movies' output of raw, violent or kitchen-sink realism and “cinéma vérité.”

At its centre stand two women: weary, bourgeois Carol (Cate Blanchett in an Oscar-worthy performance) and Therese, a young shop girl who’s not entirely in tune with her sexuality as the film begins (Rooney Mara, softer than usual). They meet and try to live out their love despite their differences in age, status and everything else… Around them evolve a jealous husband (grandiose Kyle Chandler, hero of Friday Night Lights) and a social code that refuses to aknowledge lesbians. In real melodramas, it’s all about the dichotomy between two worlds that converge and their relationship with the outside one. How do you soften the irremediable clash between internal and external reality? Everything that Haynes films, from Carol and Therese’s first meeting to their first embrace, from their secret dinners to their feverish gazes, delicately attempts to answer this question. Almost inevitably, each shot is veiled in melancholy, as if everything were already over when it had barely begun, as if catastrophe were eroding pleasure at the very moment it was born, as if the present became, in the blink of an eye, an inaccessible memory. This Proustian intensification is something we already witnessed at the beginning of the century with In the Mood for Love. While Carol doesn’t quite reach the legendary depth of Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece – its narrative is more linear for a start – it gets voluptuously close, and leaves a lasting impression on the viewer.

It can become rather dizzying when you think about the influence that Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple, currently has on our lives. Even though he died in 2011, the man who revolutionized the personal computer has managed to infiltrate the everyday existence of hundreds of millions of consenting human beings, and almost no one is upset about it. The portrait of such a phenomenon deserves better than a biopic in the hackneyed traditions of the genre – and indeed who remembers Jobs, by Joshua Michael Stern, which came out in 2013? This was the trap that Danny Boyle’s astonishing new film Steve Jobs set out to avoid. Based on an acclaimed biography by the journalist Walter Isaacson, the movie carefully steers clear of the classic narrative arc of the success story, where the rise inevitably precedes the fall, and instead prefers a circular narrative, in which the story of Steve Jobs is conjured from just three isolated moments in his life. Vibrating with intensity, each takes place during the hour preceding a product-launch event: the first in 1984, when the Macintosh computer came out; the second in 1988, when Jobs left Apple and brought out the NeXT computer; and the last in 1998, for the launch of the colourful iMac.

Such a theatrical structure could have been a little ponderous, but is in fact completely euphoric thanks to the talents of scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, author of the extraordinary political series The West Wing, as well as of the portrait of Mark Zuckerberg that is David Fincher’s The Social Network. Sorkin’s style is instantly recognizable, the screen being saturated with words, which bring out all the intelligence of his characters. In Steve Jobs, clashes of ego are rendered as rhetorical showdowns between the hero (played by Michael Fassbender) and his closest collaborators such as Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), Apple’s cofounder, his marketing director and confidante, Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), and John Sculley (Jeff Daniels), Apple’s CEO at the time. Added to the mix is Jobs’s complex relationship with his daughter, who was born in the early 80s and whom at first he didn’t want to recognize. The man in the roll-neck is portrayed in diffracted form, his bad temper and lack of empathy making themselves felt through his absurd demands, his hasty judgments and his megalomaniacal ambitions. The moment when someone tells him that being a genius absolutely does not justify behaving like a jerk, the film hits on its true subject, which structures all of Sorkin’s oeuvre: how dominating masculinity, in a position of power, must be both admired and put in its place.

Three years ago after the series of Twilight films, you changed direction, notably with David Cronenberg. You swing between elation and anxiety about the next chapter of your career. Where are you today?

I’ve accepted the idea that it takes time for the most amazing projects to come into existence. Crazy things are the most fragile things. Sometimes they collapse. I look for directors I really want to work with. For years I’ve dreamt of doing a film with the French director Claire Denis, and now finally it’s about to happen. We’re going to start making a full length science fiction film in May. The Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is going to design space ships and black holes. It’ll be completely crazy! I don’t know if my presence helped get the budget up and running, but for the film I’m making in a few days’ time [the interview took place on January 19th] I think I was a little influential. It’s a project that belongs to the brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, indie film makers from New York who are totally underground in the very best sense of the word. Josh told me how he made his first movie, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, using the money he’d got from an advert for a handbag. Thanks to just one advertisement he made a whole movie!

The Safdie brothers described you as “indomitable” in an interview. A nice compliment coming from them…

I just love them. I came across a still from their film Heaven Knows What, before the trailer was released. Blown away by the power of that image, I sent an email straight away to Brady Corbet, who I’d just made a film with - he’s now a director. I knew he was mega connected in New York, and obviously he knew the Safdie brothers. I met up with them and two months later they sent me one of the best scripts I ever read. With them I’m going to discover another kind of cinema. The other actors I’m working with aren’t professionals, because Benny and Josh do street castings. I won’t be seen as an actor in the classic sense.

By heading into more exacting cinema, do you feel as if you’ve found your path? The Twilight era finally seems over for good…

I guess that the public have a certain image of me. I still feel like I need to prove myself. I haven’t had enough lead roles for people to associate me with something else, to see me in a different light. In the meantime I’m taking my own route, always with diversity in mind. I’ve just made a film with James Gray in Columbia [The Lost City of Z]: an adventure film in suits where the characters get hungry. They get lost in the jungle and come across some ancient ruins. They love James Grey in France don’t they? He’s a perfect guy. I’ve never met more of a New Yorker than him. He really was the ideal companion to venture into the jungle [laughs]. When he went into a river, he wore one of those all-in-ones like scientists wear to avoid contamination! 

Numéro: When did you start writing Consumed?

David Cronenberg: It started as a screenplay around 2008. There was the idea of this French philosophical couple, a sort of naïve North American journalist couple and the apparent murder of the wife from the French philosophical couple, which the journalists had decided they should investigate. But at a certain point I couldn’t continue – sometimes something dies, you just don’t know why. In retrospect I may have romanticized it, but I felt I couldn’t have fulfilled the promise of the premise in movie form. I’d pushed up to the limit of that form, while the novel could give me so much more room to move in terms of complexity and intellectualism.

At what point did you turn to fiction?

There was a phone call from Nicole Winstanley at Penguin Canada. She said, “I’ve seen your movies, I’ve read your screenplays, and I really think you could and should write a novel. Have you thought of that?” Only for about 50 years, actually! I always thought I’d be a novelist, never a film-maker at all. My father was a journalist and a writer – I used to fall asleep to the sound of his typewriter. Our house was full of books, so the idea of writing was very normal to me. Being an author seemed a comfortable and obvious choice.

So how did you end up making films instead?

I was at Toronto University at the time, the New York underground was taking place – Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol… They were making movies on their own. It was the 60s, you know, you’d grab your camera, do your own thing. You didn’t have to go to film school, didn’t have to be part of Hollywood, you just did it! The technology of film was also intriguing. How do you get the sound to synchronize with the picture? People shoot with their iPhones and don’t event think about it because it’s automatically synchronized, but in film it isn’t. I was curious. I literally looked up “camera” and “lens” in the Encyclopædia Britannica and tried to figure out how you do all this stuff. I got a subscription to American Cinematographer Magazine. It was all very exciting, because suddenly I saw how films were made, whereas I hadn’t had a clue before.

What’s the difference between writing a screenplay and a novel?

Turning to literature wasn’t a quick switch, though to me writing has been neither obscure nor intimidating. Screenwriting is very, very different from prose writing. Most of my friends who were aspiring film-makers didn’t know how to write. I felt that I could, because I’d written some short stories that were published in university magazines and for which I even won some prizes. Screenwriting is a very bizarre, hybrid kind of writing, and you’d usually not get high marks for your style. When you get a screenplay that is very fulsome in its prose people say, “Oh God! This guy is a frustrated novelist, he should know he’s writing a screenplay.” In a screenplay you don’t describe the hero in great detail because you’d cast Tom Cruise and he doesn’t look like that. The only thing that goes directly from the screenplay to the screen is the dialogue. If you can write good dialogue, and have some sense of narrative structure, you can be a screenwriter. As for the quality of your prose, forget it! Some famous screenwriters can’t write at all – bad grammar, bad spelling, it’s pathetic! But they’re still good screenwriters. What’s more, there’s the pressure of commercial release versus art release. As time goes by, I realize that to make an unusual or a subversive film is very difficult because it’s extremely hard to find the financing for it, and this consideration comes into play when writing a screenplay.

The minute your book was out, people asked if you would adapt it to the screen. And you said no. Why?

When I directed the opera version of my movie The Fly in Paris, people said, “Obviously, you’ll be wanting screens and stuff.” And I said, “Absolutely not, I’ve made the movie, I don’t want to make it again. So no video trickery, just the complete theatrical experience. I want to do what somebody would have done a century ago doing an opera, using the music, the choreography and so on.” The same goes with the book: I didn’t write it as a template for a film, it doesn’t need a movie to validate it. Five or six producers approached me about adapting Consumed. But I just think of myself as the novelist who is quite happy to sell them the option and the rights. Give me the money and I’ll come to the première!

In fiction you can bring out certain details, like your character who notices that another pronounces “migraine” the British way.

You wouldn’t even get that in a film, or it would last a second. And the American audience wouldn’t understand that that was the English pronunciation. In fiction you can get the richness of detail. The way you can describe reality in depth is the name of the game for me, whether it’s physical, psychological or technological.

In 2010 Martin Scorsese made his first foray into television by directing a series pilot. But the beginnings of Boardwalk Empire (which for five seasons followed the rise of a mafia boss in 1920s Atlantic City) were rather needy. Almost as if the maestro behind Raging Bull was bored stiff trying to understanding the demands of the medium – and so were we too. The problem seems to be thankfully resolved with a brand new series, Vinyl which has gone above and beyond any expectation. It’s written by Terence Winter, formerly on the Sopranos and now a Scorsese accomplice since Boardwalk Empire and The Wolf of Wall Street. On the production side was no less than Mick Jagger, the originator of the project and official provider of juicy anecdotes. And responsible for the first episode was, of course, the director of The King of Comedy. A dazzling promise of good times to come.

It all begins in 1973, New York, in the footsteps of Richie Finestra, a record label boss in search of personal and professional renaissance.

A purchase by a competitor is imminent, and more or less agreed. But he spends his days snorting coke, fixing his problems by creating more, questioning the meaning of his commitments and passions. Between the mafia and the groups who’ll be playing the sounds of tomorrow, daily life is relentlessly volatile. His is a chemically pure male character haunted by guilt, overwhelmed by violence, fickle yet heroic. Actor Bobby Cannavale, barely known until now, imbues him with an immediacy of pain and determination. 

Numéro: David Altmejd, for Yeasayer’s album cover you’ve created an impressive installation that mixes up legendary characters and surreal creatures, what’s it all about?

David Altmejd: To start with the group got in touch with me to supervise the visual identity of the album. But I’m a sculptor. The only thing I know how to do is create objects and spaces. So I suggested making sculptures that they could then use as they liked.

Yeasayer:  And so then one morning a box was delivered. Inside it we found the sculptures and our heads… decapitated. They looked like David’s works that often feature deformed human figures. We carefully put them in our studio and carried on recording with this weird feeling that they were watching us. And almost even judging us...

David Altmejd: And then I had the idea of bringing together all the mythical, religious and imaginary characters that people Yeasayer’s new album, in a life-size installation. I wanted to take them from the musical world of the record into our material world.

Yeasayer: The religious theme lies at the heart of our new album. For Amen & Goodbye, we even wanted to write a real religious manifesto…even though none of us are believers. Our idea was to highlight the continuity between religions, from the Babylonian gods like Ishtar to the Greek and Roman gods, from Judaism to Christianity.

Numéro: It’s not the first time David that mythical figures feature in your work. Your sculptures appear to represent angels sometimes at then werewolves at others… 

David Altmejd: I’ve never gone looking for a mythical figure to integrate into my work. They come to the surface during the creative process, without me even noticing. The angel figure for example appeared during my Bodybuilders series. The Bodybuilders are bodies that use their hands to move their own material from one place to another. In a way they reconfigure themselves. One of the fundamental gestures in sculpture, well for me anyway, is taking the materials to a higher place. Now imagine that bodybuilder making the same movement, taking the material of his leg, making a hole, to take his own body higher. Material starts to accumulate behind his shoulders. He grows wings. The figure of an angel appears. I like the idea that such simple gestures can give birth to a figure that’s existed in the history of humanity for thousands of years. I feel like I’m touching something fundamental, that my relationship with the material ends up creating sense. 

You’re currently showing at two exhibitions in Brussels: L’Air, at the Xavier Hufkens Gallery, and Les Géants, at the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. What can we see there?

David Altmejd: At Xavier Hufkens, I wanted to create a calm, light and silent ambiance, that adapts perfectly to the gallery space.

I’m showing a head, mirrored structures that seem to disappear into the space, and other sculptures too, notably the Bodybuilders I was talking about earlier. At the Musées Royaux, the exhibition will be noisier with six giants almost five meters tall installed in the middle of the immense forum. These giants are very different from the human-size figures that I’ve been making for a few years. When I was working on them, they were so big I actually forgot they were bodies. All I could see was a space that I had transformed into a laboratory. I’d dig a hole in a leg, and that would become a cave to be explored. So I hid things inside them…

Is the act of artistic creation a way for you to invent worlds?

Yeasayer: When we compose, we always hope to create pieces that are so deep they could contain entire worlds. Our music has always had the ambition of telling stories. And in that sense its closer to a film or a book.

Listening to them, the simplest of stories can take on an infinite scope. If it’s about a grandmother serving soup, you can’t just ‘see’ the scene, but you also have to smell the aroma of the soup and feel the slow and painful movements of this grandmother. Music, like all arts, has this capacity to provide a fully immersive environment and to create complex worlds. 

David Altmejd: I started my art studies with painting. But I quickly moved over to the benefits of sculpture. It is the only thing to exist in the same space as the viewer. It lives and breathes the same air. Unlike painting, drawing, photography and cinema that exist only in the space of representation.

I like sculpture because it is a body among other bodies. And the body is the most fascinating object in the world. I’m not talking about the shape or the skin, but this object that’s so complex it can contain a world as infinite as the human being. I want my sculptures to be bodies. I want them to be like human bodies: finite volumes with infinite interior spaces. 

Every track on Amen & Goodbye appears to have been constructed according to its own biological process, like a living organism that hasn’t stopped growing by aggregating random sonorous textures. How do you bring these pieces to life?

Yeasayer: We start with an idea and we experiment. When the music becomes too obvious we move away from that and add new textures to it. Our work follows a chaotic process of construction. In fact chaos is the very essence of the band. You bring in your ideas and the other members start to modify them. The perfect little world that you’d built at home disappears. Chaos takes its place. And that’s how things move forward.

David Altmejd: My work follows the same process of construction-deconstruction. I never start with sketches or plans. I improvise. I sculpt a body and then realise all of a sudden, that I need to cut off an arm, or add material somewhere else, and in this way the object appears to be in constant motion. This notion of movement is primordial in my eyes.

Sculpture must be living, bursting with energy and tension. To achieve this it must give the impression of being in a constant state of construction, as if caught up in a dynamic. A completed sculpture for me is a dead object of no further interest.

Yeasayer: With Amen & Goodbye, we too strived to move as far as possible from a creation that was too frozen, too perfect. The advantage of working with computers is that we can always improve the sound. But it ends up with a boring perfection, void of the faults that render a piece of music unique. We’re moving away from electro music back towards a production style that’s closer to the rock of the 60s and 70s, holding on to all those accidents that any sound engineer would immediately remove from tracks today. On the album you can hear the hum of an old piano, the sound of a machine that gets turned on in the middle of a take, or the sounds of nature that surrounded us while we were recording in the middle of the countryside.

Numéro: What coincidence led a director born in Palermo and raised in Ethiopia to meet a chef established in the Abruzzo region?

Luca Guadagnino: It was ten years ago, I was invited to the festival in Sulmona, a little town in the heart of Abruzzo. And, as is my way – I have to admit to being a real gourmet – I immediately looked up the best restaurants in the region. Niko’s stood out immediately. And while our work and the surroundings in which we evolve are completely different, we became close because we share, beyond a love for good food, the same vision of creativity. I can sum it up in one sentence: less is more.

Niko Romito: I express myself in a language that cuts straight to the essential and this leads to very simple dishes – which paradoxically requires a huge amount of work and discipline. My approach to cooking always starts with the product. I get to know it first in order to offer a dish that unveils its profound being, without any sleight of hand or pomposity. For this you have to try and take away, again and again. My ultimate ambition is for the product to speak by itself.

Luca Guadagnino: It’s the same thing, I hope, with my film making. I like starting my films with a multitude of ingredients to end up concentrating on only three or four essential elements. The title A Bigger Splash is a reference of course to the iconic work by David Hockney. The composition of that painting is also very simple: a few blocks of solid colour, clean cut elementary forms. And yet it opens a world of great depth.