Madonna, murder and the first feast.

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In 1998, Ottawa held a collective art show called The Feast, in which each participating artist was invited to offer their own interpretation of the theme. Claude MarQuis chose to go back to the very beginning.

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The First Feast (1998) is a large-scale painting — 72×48 inches — depicting Eve at a kitchen table in her underwear, smoking a cigarette, a bitten apple on a plate before her. She wears a halo. She is entirely contemporary, entirely human, and entirely unrepentant. 

This is MarQuis’s interpretation of humanity’s original feast: the fruit of knowledge — the moment everything changed, rendered as a quiet morning-after. 

The model was one of the co-owners of Ottawa's Mercury Lounge — the same beloved arts venue where MarQuis had exhibited his Worriers series two years earlier.

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A companion painting places Adam at the same table — modelled by the other Mercury Lounge co-owner — same setting setting, same charged ordinariness, the same suggestion that what happened in the Garden of Eden may have looked less like divine transgression and more like two people deciding, over coffee, to think for themselves.

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The following year, The First Feast travelled to South Beach, Florida, where it was shown at the Bar Room — a celebrated nightclub presented by Chris Paciello and Ingrid Casares under their company, Paciello & Ingrid Casares Ventures. Casares was a South Beach socialite and Madonna’s close confidante, while Paciello had built one of the most glamorous nightlife empires on Ocean Drive.

Months after the exhibition, he was charged in connection with a 1993 murder. The glittering world of South Beach nightlife, it turned out, had its own serpents in the garden.

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That same year, MarQuis also exhibited a selection of works from earlier series at Liquid, another celebrated South Beach nightclub — completing a remarkable Ottawa-to-Miami moment in his career.

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The First Feast eventually sold years later, after a well-travelled life. It now resides in a private collection.