The American cheeseburger has long transcended its status as mere food, evolving into a visual symbol of both indulgence and identity, satire and sustenance. In Matthew Haghighi’s painting titled “The Cheeseburger Deluxe”, acrylic transforms into a cultural lens—magnifying not only a culinary archetype but a piece of Americana laden with contradictions. First featured in Tampa Bay Magazine under the art spread “Matt-i-fest,” the work radiates with both photographic immediacy and painterly intimacy, functioning as both homage and critique.

This piece is not just about appetite. It is about visual memory, cultural coding, and the hyperreal—all filtered through a paintbrush dipped in nostalgia and gloss.

A Close Reading of the Canvas

The painting, executed in acrylic on canvas, is a monumental close-up of a cheeseburger. It doesn’t present the item as a plate or a product but as a landscape of textures, hues, and form. Each layer of the burger—a sesame-seed-studded bun, crisp red onion, leaf lettuce, thick tomato, puckering pickles, oozing cheddar, and charred beef patty—becomes a microcosm of color theory and realism. The sesame seeds atop the bun catch glints of light with unnatural precision, as though caught in a high-resolution lens rather than painted. The red onion slices gleam with a waxy translucency, the lettuce folds curl like a Baroque garment, and the tomato—vibrant, fleshy, juicy—is rendered with almost fetishistic care.

The patty is the painting’s only truly “imperfect” form—gnarled, lumpy, and dark, speaking to the primal, cooked reality beneath the polished raw produce above. It’s a sculptural texture that evokes charcoal and earth more than meat. Melted cheese drapes over it like golden fabric, pooled and folding under gravity. The bottom bun, slightly soaked in juices, suggests tactile softness—a sandwich that’s been held, admired, yearned for.

This is not food photography. It’s a painted exaggeration of what advertising has taught us a burger should look like. In that exaggeration lies Haghighi’s genius. He doesn’t just represent the burger—he curates its mythology.

Hyperrealism and American Iconography

“The Cheeseburger Deluxe” sits comfortably within the lineage of American Pop Art and Hyperrealism, tracing its aesthetic DNA from Wayne Thiebaud’s dessert landscapes to Audrey Flack’s glossy photoreal still lifes. However, while those artists often meditated on the tension between object and illusion, Haghighi approaches it with a distinctly Gen X-to-Millennial filter, where nostalgia and irony co-exist.

What makes this work particularly sharp is its lack of context. There’s no plate, no hand, no diner backdrop. We are forced into an extreme proximity with the subject, one that removes it from consumption and makes it an object of contemplation. It’s Andy Warhol’s soup can, magnified. It’s also Claes Oldenburg’s “Floor Burger” but flattened into two-dimensional clarity. Haghighi seems to be saying: You’ve seen this before—but not like this. Not this big, this up close, this honest.

Yet, there is also affection here. This isn’t a parody; it’s a love letter to a lie—the platonic ideal of the cheeseburger that never quite exists in real life but has been etched into the collective subconscious via years of drive-thru windows, Super Bowl commercials, and playground Happy Meals.

Medium as Message: Acrylic’s Plastic Truth

Acrylic paint, with its inherently synthetic qualities, is the perfect medium for this work. Unlike oil, which breathes and bleeds, acrylic lays down flat, dries quickly, and maintains vibrancy—a mirror to the plasticity of modern consumer goods. Haghighi uses this medium with precision and restraint. There are no brush strokes that disrupt the illusion, no abstract gestures that call attention to the hand of the artist. It’s a kind of invisible labor, not unlike the behind-the-scenes manufacture of the fast-food industry itself.

This technical precision allows the artist to manipulate focus. The layers of the burger do not blur into one another, nor do they flatten into an indistinguishable pile. Each element is sharp, separate, vivid—as though they belong to different paintings altogether. The visual separation mimics the construction of an ad-burger, which is often built piece by piece for photographic perfection. Haghighi does the same, but with brushes.

Pop Culture Commentary and Editorial Placement

The inclusion of “The Cheeseburger Deluxe” in Tampa Bay Magazine’s September/October 2023 issue aligns Haghighi with a broader movement of artists using iconography to interrogate the visual language of consumption. In the spread titled “Matt-i-fest”, we see his creative mind applied to a range of subjects—from Bob Marley to Hulk Hogan to familial tenderness—and yet the burger holds its own in that eclectic company. It functions as a kind of silent protagonist, a food still life that speaks volumes.

In the magazine layout, the burger painting is cropped and situated in the lower right of the spread, next to a retro comic-style portrait and across from celebrity iconography. This positioning places the burger not as a trivial food image but as cultural capital—a painted meme, a psychological imprint, an American relic.

The caption beneath the image reads:

“In this case, the artist’s inspiration was his favorite fast-food item—a deluxe cheeseburger with tomato, onion, and lettuce.”

It’s a simple description, but the image far outpaces it in its narrative scope.

Artist Biography and Narrative Depth

Matthew Haghighi, a multidisciplinary artist based in the United States, is known for combining humor, cultural commentary, and high-saturation portraiture in ways that are both accessible and poignant. Much of his work leans into what can be called “aesthetic anthropology”—an examination of symbols and their social imprint.

The burger painting is not a deviation from his larger practice but rather a condensation of it. Haghighi’s broader body of work includes tributes to cultural legends, pop culture reinventions, and emotionally rich depictions of family. In the context of this portfolio, the cheeseburger becomes more than food. It’s an American face, as recognizable and constructed as the celebrities he also paints.

Symbolic Analysis: Hunger, Excess, and Identity

To analyze “The Cheeseburger Deluxe” through a semiotic lens is to unpack a multi-tiered argument about capitalism, body politics, and visual culture. The cheeseburger—perhaps more than the hot dog or the soda—has become shorthand for American identity, both praised and ridiculed across the globe.

The over-saturation of color and exaggerated freshness in the painting reveal how idealized food presentation can distort real hunger. This burger is too unique to eat. It doesn’t invite a bite—it commands distance, like a display behind glass. This is the Burger as Idol, a simulacrum that stands in for actual sustenance. Haghighi plays with this duality, challenging the viewer to reconsider what we’re consuming—not just physically, but visually and ideologically.

There’s also something deeply bodily about the way the layers press against one another. The painting is oddly sensual—puckered tomato skin, slick cheese, moist meat, veiny lettuce—recalling the indulgence of pleasure and guilt. This isn’t a health-food icon. It’s a confession.

The Absence of Human Touch

Notably, no human presence exists in the painting. There is no hand reaching, no mouth ready to bite, no table beneath. By removing context, Haghighi universalizes the experience while also depersonalizing it. The burger becomes symbol, not snack. And that makes the hunger it evokes metaphorical—a hunger for belonging, pleasure, simplicity, and memory.

Flow

Among art critics and local gallery circuits, “The Cheeseburger Deluxe” has been praised for its pop-cultural sharpness and technical finesse. Collectors view it as a bridge between contemporary realism and consumer critique. It has drawn comparisons to Tjalf Sparnaay, the Dutch master of hyperreal food paintings, though Haghighi’s approach is warmer, more humorous, less aloof.

Its print appearance in a respected regional magazine marks its cultural relevance, but this painting would not feel out of place in an international contemporary fair or curated pop-surrealism show.

Impression

In sum, “The Cheeseburger Deluxe” is a painting of enormous restraint, crafted with the care of a still life but delivered with the impact of a billboard. It’s a hyperreal illusion, a cultural relic, a commentary disguised as appetite.

Through his acrylic strokes, Matthew Haghighi invites us not only to see but to re-see—to confront the way we fetishize and remember food, how our nostalgia is often manufactured, and how something as common as a cheeseburger can become a portal to everything we are hungry for.

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