Art doesn’t get any butter than this CNE tradition
This year’s sculptures include High Park capybara, the Ikea monkey and a panda-cuddling Trudeau
When David Salazar leaves the Canadian National Exhibition, his hands are incredibly moisturized and his whole body smells like butter.
“Your arms, your body is glistening,” Salazar said. “Everything you eat, everything you handle, you can feel the butter on it.”
Salazar is the lead artist at this year’s butter sculpture exhibit at the CNE. So far he’s made a butter version of a High Park capybara and the infamous Ikea monkey — and he’s collaborating on a buttery Justin Trudeau cuddling two baby pandas.
Salazar crafts his high-calorie creations behind a glass screen in a refrigerated box, while fairgoers gawk and take photos.
It’s slippery and cold inside the sculpting fridge — about 10 C — but it smells delicious. As a butter lover, Salazar says it can take willpower to resist sneaking a taste.
“Of course I’m tempted! I love butter!” he said, laughing. During the Ex, Salazar will spend about six hours a day handling globs of unsalted butter, but he’s not sick of it yet. “So far, I still butter my toast in the morning.”
By the end of the fair, there’ll be more than a dozen butter sculptures by 11 different artists in the box, Salazar said — including the rest of the capybara family and the doughnut-stealing raccoon that made headlines in 2015. The artists will use 2,700 pounds of butter in total, which all gets composted at the end, a CNE spokesperson said.
Salazar wears a coat and hat inside the chilly fridge — but the butter still seeps through his sturdy work gloves. When he pulls them off, his hands are shining and remarkably soft.
“It’s pretty funny working with butter. It’s a little surreal,” said Salazar, who says dealing with the cold is one of the hardest parts of butter art.
Butter sculptures are a long-running tradition at the CNE, dating back to the 1950s. Memorable past sculptures include Rob Ford reading a Margaret Atwood novel, Yoda and Toronto’s favourite dead raccoon — all created by Olenka Kleban, who organized this year’s show.
The theme this year is “Wild in the 6” and features famous GTA animals. On Tuesday, Salazar started work on a giant hog — an homage to Hogtown.
He first builds an internal frame out of wood and metal lath, before sculpting around it with dozens of kilograms of buttery goodness.
The unsalted butter comes in 25kilogram boxes (nutritional information included), and has to soften for a day or two outside the fridge before it’s ready for sculpting.
On Tuesday afternoon, Sean Kosonic carved detailing into Justin Trudeau’s face using a small butter knife with “Spread Love” on it. He’s one of several artists working on Butter Trudeau over the course of the Ex, slowly adding details to perfect his creamy likeness.
“Chiselled faces are always easier,” Kosonic said as he smoothed the prime minister’s buttery lips. “When someone has a good nose, it’s a good place to start.”
He and Salazar are both graduates of OCAD University and don’t usu- ally work in such a high-cholesterol medium. Kosonic is a metalworker, while Salazar sculpts with clay and works on public sculptures. The CNE butter artists are often OCAD grads and come from a diverse range of backgrounds.
Both Salazar and Kosonic like working with butter; it’s a fun, versatile material that’s a lot like clay, in a sense.
“We produce a lot of butter, so it’s nice to see what else we can do with it,” said Salazar, who last did butter sculpting in 2007.
As the artists work, people clamour outside the box, pointing and taking pictures. Many ask questions or share their memories of past exhibitions, and Salazar loves seeing kids react with glee.
People often bang on the glass, however, which gives him a lot more empathy for zoo animals.
“At times you feel like a monkey,” he said.
As he worked on the hog, a man stopped by to chat, fondly remembering seeing the butter sculptures as a child.
“I love them, they’re great,” Steve Beattie said. “I don’t know if it’s much to anybody else, but to me it’s part of the CNE. It’s our heritage.”
But not everybody shares his sentiment.
“That’s disgusting!” one man exclaimed as he walked by.
Probably a margarine fan.