A strawberry sundae, a slice of greasy pepperoni pizza… foods I’ve sometimes held but without much thought–until now. Upon painting them their significance shifted. They became more than just food—they became symbols of decadence; seductive, excessive, strangely artificial and somewhat tragic.

But this decadence, not just in the everyday sense of “indulgent,” but in the way the Decadent writers of the 19th century—Baudelaire, Wilde, Huysmans—used the word. For them, decadence meant a decline dressed up as beauty: artifice over nature, sensation over meaning, style over substance. They celebrated the unnatural, finding glamour in decay and art in self-destruction.

Our food culture today feels like its own decadent novel. Engineered sweetness, hyper-palatable grease, rainbow-colored desserts that dazzle the eye but say little about nourishment. Beneath the gleam is something more troubling: a slow erosion of health, knowledge, and balance. Yet we keep reaching for it, again and again, drawn in by the shine.