Cartoon Bust — Chef-Owner, Riso-Print Treatment, Lyon

The restaurant has held a star for nineteen years and the kitchen has been run by the same two hands for all of them. The dining room wanted the bust to live in the courtyard, where the family eats in summer, and they wanted it to look like something that came off a small press.

Three inks, deliberately out of register

Risograph printing has a specific look: two or three flat inks, each printed separately, overlapping imperfectly so that a third colour appears only where two of them cross. It is cheap, fast and slightly wrong, and it has become the visual signature of a certain kind of independently published food magazine.

So the bust is teal, fluorescent pink and black. Teal is the jacket and the hair. Pink is the skin. Where the two overlap at the collar, a muddy mauve appears, and that is the only tonal transition on the piece.

Making the misregistration

The whole effect depends on the inks not lining up. We reproduced it by offsetting the pink third of the sculpture from the teal third by about 4 mm at the shoulder, 8 mm at the ear and 2 mm at the chin, so the displacement changes across the form the way a real misprint does when the paper shifts.

The grain was the other half of the job. Risograph ink sits on the paper with a fine mottle, so the finish is a low-sheen two-pack with a slightly uneven lay-down, never fully flat and never glossy.

The caricature

At 1.5 m this is the smallest piece in its category, which was the client’s choice: it has to sit beside a courtyard table without dominating it. The exaggeration is all in the head — a little too large, a little too tilted, with the trademark tea towel over one shoulder reproduced in teal.

In the courtyard

It stands on the paving beside the herb bed, at the exact spot where the chef has stood for photographs after every service since 2007. The kitchen staff polish it with the same cloth they use on the pass. It already has a slightly polished cheek, and nobody intends to stop that.