Presented on a singular day as a celebration of community, Marco Villard’s HOT DOG PARTY, is comprised of eleven still life’s and figurative scenes celebrating the iconography of an American staple, the hot dog. Executed in a naïf colour palette of flat and unapologetically cheerful hues, Villard’s works depict table scapes and humble frankfurters with a childlike clarity while simultaneously traversing the cultural resonances of such a celebrated commodity.
For over a century the hot dog has functioned as America's edible emblem of reprieve—handheld solace at roadside stands, concession lines, and sports games, all seemingly insubstantial moments of community pause. Within each of Villard’s eleven paintings, the bun and sausage emerge not as mere fast food, but as icons of this shared respite that punctuates our association with the summery dog.
Alongside the elucidation of its Americana and explorations of the synonymity with community. Villard’s hot dog paintings naively intersect the icon with the tradition of vanitas still lifes. Specifically taking inspiration from H. van Steenwijck’s Still Life, An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (ca. 1640). In which a meticulously lit composition of skull, pocket watch, extinguished lamp, shell, sword, and lute serve as reminders of mortality, time, wealth, and worldly vanity.
Borrowing objects from Steenwijck’s tables-cape, Villard playfully subverts it’s somber lineage. The shared motif of skulls as a symbol of death are instead superimposed against his stylized dogs to offer a jubilant rejoinder yes, life is finite, but within its brevity lie moments of communal delight. The rustic simplicity of wooden chairs, ceramic plates and mustard drizzles becomes Villard’s metaphor for a community ritual that asks us to take a moment of pause, consume together, share in public spaces, form fleeting connections, celebrate the joyous banality of collective existence.
Ultimately, Villard’s works reminds us that simple reprieve—shared among strangers alongside highways, or even at a SoHo coffee shop—is itself a kind of sacred ritual. Through his eleven stylized hot dog paintings and their coinciding event he is asserting that the communal bite, the shared pause, are small yet enduring monuments of the true idea of Americana—and to our enduring need for connection. Undoubtably, Hot Dog Party is more than a romanticization of a processed American meat, it is a series of democratic still-lives presented on a singular day that ask you to preform a profoundly human act, celebrate.
-Victoria McClure