Part II is anchored in Hofstede’s wall-wide installation of record covers, Food for Thought, part of his monumental series of Pop-Frescos that include Ocean, River, Totem, Reach the Beach, and Abendrot. In this work, the familiar saying “We are what we eat” gives rise to a music-charged statement on our survival in the midst of food crises. The cover of Foo Fighters’ Medium Rare album is a case in point: what’s at stake with a raw piece of meat? And in the center of the mural is the cover of Donna Summer’s She Works Hard for the Money, with the singer dressed as a waitress, ready to take orders from the audience (or pen a social critique).

We are spoiled for choice. There are references to foods, and hence customs, of cultures from across the globe: Japanese, Jewish, Italian, Mexican, American, presented in a mouthwatering cocktail of drinks, desserts, candies, and fruit. Poignantly, the musicians, like Foo Fighters, Chic, Specials, Isaac Hayes, Steely Dan, Squeeze, Wild Cherry, Curve, and Prince, are brought together by the artist to offer a possible response—serious and jocular, as the case may be—to the pervasive artifice of pop (culture and music) in relation to food, how we might think about it, discuss it, share it, and even eat it.

Food as a staple of pop culture served to us on a daily basis (also an important theme for Part I) is taken up differently—in artistic and emotional terms—in the drawings. In The Fresh Arrival of Healthy Pop Art, The Land of Milk and Honey Pops, Kellogg’s Skull Cathedral, and in smaller works, Hofstede’s textural intensity and painterly qualities rival the pop vibrancy of his LPs and prints. But the familiar effect of pop gives way to that which, to quote Hofstede, “communicates the territory of dream.” These works do not merely trace trends but rather foreshadow—and give voice to—urgent themes, as laid out in the remarkable text Hilarius Hofstede, or “Avant moi, le déluge…” by Professor Jean-Michel Rabatè, presented at the opening of Part I.