“You feel so much better if you try grapefruit with tuna—this meal is easy and quick.”

Le Steak de la Mer takes its title from a 1980s magazine advert pairing grapefruit with tuna. Reworking this found image, Raquelle Verheyen looks at how advertising turns desire and beauty ideals into signals that we pick up, repeat and wear as markers of identity and value.

Raquelle’s practice invites us to notice the loops at work in a consumer society. Here images shape habits, habits feed markets, markets commission more images. At the same time, she points to the traces that production and consumption leave behind, and the odd border between the material and the immaterial where objects and ideas swap places. Things become messages, messages become things.