“Photographic food is devoured in a tin world”. Composition, disposition and resolution in an animated still life in a relatively bidimensional, geometrically designed, space. This space, which lies somewhere between bi- and tridimensionality, unfolds its flat elements like chairs. The purpose of this is something as simple as eating. But the food is flat. This animation short film presents the photographed food at various stages of its ingestion by invisible guests at the table.

El sabor de la comida de lata is an animated vanitas, portraying the development of a meal without guests at the table. The food, simply drawn, is gradually ingested in a scene for which the flat elements have been modified to point to the uniform quality and taste of tin food. Gaspar, following the tradition of the still life in the history of painting, represents in this short film the dichotomy between fiction and reality. Some of the elements on screen are real, while others are drawn (the difference is established in their tri- and bidimensional relations). Exactly as it happens in the still life genre, here the artist reflects on reality and its representation, on how the latter can become another reality.

The technique employed by Gaspar in this piece and in the rest of her animation oeuvre is stop-motion filming. This basic technique of animation registers, shot by shot, both drawn images and photographs, as well as other still objects, to then suggest their movement in projection. A couple of shots are filmed, and then, without moving the camera, the state or position of the object is subtly changed. This process is repeated over and over in order to accumulate enough static images to suggest movement (which wasn’t there during the filming) with the projection, one after the other, of the different static shots. This is an animation technique, called “shot by shot”, previously used by Georges Melies, James Stuart Blackton and Segundo de Chomón, from Zaragoza.

With El sabor de la comida de lata, Gaspar seems to be paying tribute to Chomon’s most famous piece, El hotel eléctrico [Electric hotel] of 1908. This is a hotel in which, as is the case in El sabor de la comida de lata, objects come alive (hair brushes that brush on their own, shoes that untie their own laces, furniture that wonders around the room, etc.), except that in Gaspar’s piece, there are no subjects.