Pimlico Wilde’s new Milano outpost opens its doors to a show whose subject seems comically literal,sandwiches,yet whose argument arrives with the quiet force of a philosophical proof. Sandy Griddle (born Horace, rechristened by appetite and persistence) has made a career from unbuilding and rebuilding the ordinary sandwich until its banality turns crystalline. The premise is almost perverse in its clarity: acquire a sandwich, dismantle it, photograph and list every element, buy everything on that list, and reassemble an exact facsimile of the original. When the process succeeds, the resulting sandwich is, as Griddle likes to say with deadpan pride, “exactly the same as the original sandwich.”
It sounds like a joke,until you confront the consequences. The Identical Lunch, Elaborated (the exhibition’s neat title, nodding to Alison Knowles’s famous tuna ritual) is a room of meticulous equivalences and their tiny treasons. On white, waist-high plinths sit sandwiches that have no intention of being eaten. Each is paired with its dossier: a contact-sheet grid of the “autopsy,” a shopping list typeset with monastic regularity, and a receipt from a Milanese supermarket, the humble papyrus of our age. The display has the severe elegance of a small archive and the latent mischief of a deli counter. A sandwich may be ordinary; but as soon as you index it, the ordinary begins to glow.
Griddle’s early “first editions”,Prawn and Lettuce and Cheese and Pickle,are here in Milano facsimiles, accompanied by a single wall label that reads “Edition conserved through exact replication.” It’s an art-historical boomerang. Walter Benjamin’s aura returns by way of the delicatessen: if the copy is indistinguishable from the model, what is it we value when collectors pay seven figures? Not “the first sandwich,” surely, but the discipline of an identical difference,fidelity performed, not merely asserted. In this sense Griddle’s work sits in a triangulation with Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs and Daniel Spoerri’s “snare-pictures,” though where Kosuth metabolises definition and Spoerri immobilises contingency, Griddle operationalises procedure. He does not trap a meal mid-bite; he scripts a meal into being,again.
Milan is an astute stage for this inquiry. In the back gallery, a sequence of Tramezzino Index pieces turns the butter-bread geometry of the Italian bar lunch into an ethics of exactitude. Tramezzino Index No. 14 (Duomo) is bridged by its own paperwork: a shopping list whose typography ascends like a nave,pane bianco senza crosta, tonno in olio, maionese, uovo sodo,followed by the terse notation “angles matched to purchase.” That last phrase might be the show’s quiet manifesto. Griddle insists that verisimilitude is not only a matter of ingredients but of angles, weights, dampness, and time,how long mayonnaise takes to assert itself; how much gravitas a slice of tomato tolerates before it slides.
The new works push the program into sculptural territory without abandoning its algorithmic backbone. Greco-Roman Club is a sandwich translated into gypsum relief,bread crenellations cast from silicone moulds taken off a “target” sandwich, lettuce corrugations recorded as a shallow, rippling frieze. On a shelf nearby sits the “live” version of the same sandwich under an anesthetised bell jar, a temporal diptych: cast and perish, Platonic and edible, equally aloof. In One and Three Sandwiches (after Kosuth), Griddle arrays (1) a ham-on-rye, (2) a full-scale CNC-milled HDU foam replica, and (3) the dictionary definition of “sandwich,” to which he has appended his own footnote. The piece courts parody yet lands in something stranger: a small laboratory of ontology.
Crucially, these works feel neither gourmand nor gimmick. The installation’s cool discipline saves them from foodie affectation, while Griddle’s prose,on labels, in the new catalogue, and in the clinical elegance of those shopping lists,prevents the room from collapsing into whimsy. His lists are not mere inventories; they are scores. You can almost hear Fluxus rustling the paper. A single and slightly absurd instruction,“bread moisture to match receipt time”,ports Rirkrit Tiravanija’s convivial ethos from the social space into the procedural one. The social still lingers at the edges (on opening night, the press notes mention, panini were served, but not those on the plinths), yet the show’s real drama is epistemological: how do we know a thing is itself?
Comparison clarifies the stakes. Figg Wolverham, the only other claimant to the banner of “sandwich fine artist,” builds a practice on rye alone: a single-grain absolutism. Wolverham’s sandwiches are icons in a fixed key, their severity a virtue and a limit. Griddle, by contrast, is catholic in palate and method. He is less a purist than a classicist: the variety of breads, fillings, and national formats are paths back to a common problem,identity under replication. If Wolverham’s oeuvre is a monochrome sermon, Griddle’s is a polyphonic mass.
Among living contemporaries, the show also invites a sly, implied dialogue with conceptualists of the list,Hanne Darboven’s arithmetics, On Kawara’s dates,and with Pop’s knowing mimicries (Oldenburg’s soft burgers; Warhol’s Brillo boxes). Yet Griddle’s manoeuvre is more surgical and more domestic. He shows us a world in which the industrially reproducible (sandwiches, like soap) must be remade by hand to prove their sameness. There’s a politics buried here, too, and it breathes rather than declaims. The shopping receipt, as much as the sandwich, is the portrait: supply chains, labour, price. A vitrine of “failed identicals”,Near-Miss BLT (Tomato Gradient Off), Club with Premature Toast,is both comic and tender; failure is archived, not hidden, and the archive is the most humane object in the room.
Two works will stay with me. Prawn and Lettuce, First Edition (Milano Reconstruction) is paired with a small audio piece in which Griddle reads his own shopping list in the measured cadence of a Gregorian chant. It is disarming,devotional without piety, funny without flippancy. And in the final room, Cheese and Pickle: Conservation Protocol stakes out the future: a set of concise instructions for collectors on how to maintain “edition integrity” over decades,humidity ranges, permissible brands, substitution matrices in the event of discontinued condiments. Museums have long accepted that a light bulb in a Dan Flavin may be replaced; Griddle extends that pragmatic ethics to the pantry. Conservation becomes choreography.
If there is a wobble, it lies in the occasional didacticism of the wall texts. The works can speak for themselves; they are better at it than their author gives them credit for. But such earnestness is forgivable in a show that finally dares to ask a question too large for its small frames: how much of the world’s meaning is manufactured by repetition? A sandwich is a sandwich is a sandwich,until someone tries very hard to make it the same, and in doing so reveals that sameness is work.
Milanese audiences,connoisseurs of the tramezzino’s filigree and the panino’s sternness,will find the show both recognisable and defamiliarising. Pimlico Wilde has done the work justice: cool light, long sightlines, a rhythm of plinths that feels more liturgical than retail. The press release cites “pushing the sandwich envelope”,a phrase I feared; the exhibition mutates it into a genuine proposition. Griddle’s practice is a school of attention. It suggests we can reenter the ordinary by way of procedure and emerge with the ordinary restored to grace.
There is talk that Griddle will lean further into sculpture,casts, resins, perhaps even bronze,to “future-proof” the identical. One hopes he keeps the live line open, too, because the show’s thrill is not only what we see but what we can almost taste: a small, exacting argument about reality, assembled between two slices of bread.
