CONTACT: karim.blanc@gmail.com

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I was born in 1968, in Tehran, to French parents who had left their small provincial towns to discover the world. As my father was a cultural attaché, I got a childhood on the move: Iran, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Lebanon, Norway. Then, as an adult: Canada, France, Mexico, India. Today I live in Vienna,Austria.

In Norway, around my 11th year, during the cold and rainy winters, I started baking, drawing, and writing recipes for the local kid’s newspaper. With the years, my interest in drawing and painting grew and I studied art at the university. To finance my studies, I took upon cooking jobs.

After my studies, in 1996 I worked as a graphic designer for a magazine in Montreal and exhibited my art works in galleries. In 2000, I moved to the south of France where I worked as interior designer and pursued my painting activities.

In my early forties, I started organizing cross-over evenings at my studio with live music, reading, performance and cooking. That’s how cooking came back into my life as a creative activity, not just as a side job for paying bills.

When I moved to Vienna, in 2012, I had no interest in cooking at a regular restaurant, I wanted something more versatile, less repetitive and more “out of the box”. I started by offering my services as a flying cook.

I improvised lunches in creative office spaces, I cooked in tents for the artists of the Nomadic Village (an art residency on the road) in England and France. I created three-course dinners inspired by the texts of contemporary French poets at the poetry festival “Poema” in Nancy, France. As these venues did not have cooking facilities, I designed and built my own portable kitchen, it was first called the Synaesthetic Suitcase, later I renamed it the CookCase.

The name came from my interest in the phenomenon of synaesthesia, a condition in which someone experiences one sense through another: being able to smell sounds or taste colours, for example. Participating in these venues brought me to create links between text, visual art and taste.

Finally, I came to the conclusion that to really experiment with food, to come up with interesting combinations of ingredients to create my own recipes, I needed a space to cook with the adequate kitchen equipment.

That’s how I started to cook at the offices of Vice Austria where I prepare everyday fresh vegetarian and vegan meals. Whenever I cook, either for office lunches or caterings at special events, I take inspiration from culinary traditions around the world and turn them into my own veggie and vegan cuisine.

Every time I think of a new recipe, I start to draw. Doing sketches helps me select the aromas, and imagine the final visual outcome. It is not only about illustrating the recipes, but conceiving them while drawing.