When he's not collecting art and visiting art galleries, San Francisco-based pastry chef Dante Nuno indulges in a little side project: bringing paintings to life in the form of, well, cake.Sugar is Nuno's secret weapon, whether it is fondant, gum paste, pastillage, ganache or modeling chocolate.Terming his edible artwork-inspired cakes as a way of paying “homage” to the art he loves, the cake designer and sugar artist tells Artinfo that he has always been drawn to the art world."I grew up in Los Angeles going to museums. As an adult, I was a regular gallery-goer. It was paintings and sculptures that I was always drawn to. It got to the point that... everything I see now is a cookie or a cake," he divulges."Everything I see has to be turned into a sugar sculpture of some sort, and my mind naturally starts trying to figure out how I can build the appropriate structure to turn that thing into a cookie or cake.""Sugar is the only medium I've ever worked with, so I naturally try to figure out how I am going to replicate something in sugar. It was a compulsion. Even now, it's a compulsion."View Dante Nuno's cake art—and the artworks that inspired them—here.As a boy, the self-taught baker "experimented with things in my kitchen even as a child, just to see what kinds of products would be produced if I altered recipes". An awakening of sorts came when he moved to New York to attend a culinary course at the Culinary Institute of America—and promptly realized he was far more interested in the baking course."I really spent most of my time gazing through the windows of the baking department, watching the students prepare everything from granita to plated desserts. I was mesmerized."After moving back to California, Nuno continued to exercise a healthy aversion against planting sugar flowers on cakes ("Those had no creativity to them, and everyone puts flowers on their cakes") and started thinking about how he could push the boundaries of baking.A turning point of sorts came when he set out to model his first art cake for Toronto-based surreal artist Ray Caesar. Based on a fantastical painting by Caesar featuring "an underwater Marie-Antoinette-type female figure with tentacles for legs, trapped in an underwater opera-like scene carrying her medieval candelabra before her", the effort paid off handsomely for Nuno in more ways then one."It took a month to make all of the pieces for the cake, but I drove it down to LA for his show successfully with no breakage," he recalls, saying he was taken aback by the overwhelming attention his cake garnered."It was a huge hit at the gallery. People didn't know it was a cake, and when we carved into it, the crowd was dazzled," he says, adding that pictures of the art cake later went viral online.Making cakes for artists has the added advantage of creative control: as kindred spirits, artists who seek out Nuno to make cake versions of their work have an unspoken understanding that he is, after all, a pastry artist in his own right."Being artists... (they) understand that the creative process can't always be scripted, unlike a bride who asks for a cake and you have to commit to the particular design."You have liberties that you don't otherwise have with other clients."Dante Nuno’s works are on Flickr.
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