Napkin Set - À table with Johanna Dumet

In French-speaking countries, “À table” is the ubiquitous call to eat, sit, and join others when food is ready. For her napkins, Johanna Dumet created a set of unique prints, each with its playful depiction of food and wine, inviting us to see the white space of the table as analogous to the raw space of a painting, beseeching us, as one napkin reads, to “Get dirty and enjoy your food.” Eating is ritualistic, wild, and a place for uncivilized behaviour, though it is often treated as just the opposite, and the cultivated napkin is a symbol of the desire to keep things nice and neat when we gorge. But maybe this icon of cleanliness can be put to other uses.