Brent Roe's autodogmatic, anti-transcendent trip

Consciousness, to paraphrase Pascal, differentiates humanity from just so many blades of grass.1 Maybe it fell to the visual arts in the twentieth-century to remind us of this. What better way to illustrate enlightenment than in the single, instantaneously apprehended image?

Beginning in the war ravaged Europe of the 1920's and in the war time America of the 1940's, abstract artists liberated themselves from the responsibility of reproducing images from life and discovered the powerful and liberating possibilities of making art in the existential present. These artists no longer saw the canvas as a window through which to view a metaphorical diorama. They saw it as a flat surface, with which to record the spontaneous, the accidental and the physical properties of painting. The new painting was to be about being alive "to the moment" – to the chaos of unmediated feeling. The artwork did not, nor could not, describe, represent or symbolize this new attitude. It became a record of a lived event or, existed as a self contained, parallel entity.

Brent Roe's paintings are not abstract or non-objective in the commonly understood meaning of the terms. Yet, he is an inheritor of this legacy of abstract art and its influence carries through to the present day. Strongly affected by abstract art in Toronto in the seventies, and its promise of personal freedom, Roe for a time painted energetic, non-objective, abstract canvases. Toward the close of the decade, however, he and many other young artists at the time experienced a profound discontent with the received culture of abstraction.

 "It was getting outside of a mind set, getting into the unconscious, away from the linear way of thinking, once you start to smear paint around you kind of get lost in it. I'd spent a good couple of years painting abstract -- going at it with a bit of a fervour. Then I got into figurative. I started to feel that the abstract just became another academic theory."2

 The younger generation of artists to which Roe belonged was influenced by the convergence of political issues in the early eighties. A renewed cold war and arms build-up, economic recession, environmentalism and feminism brought into relief the degree to which the culture of abstract art had become cloistered, and had drifted away from contemporary life. It had become, quite simply, just another "genre" – an academic style with its own rules and standards -- removed from any direct, experienced connection to the present. The old principals and taboos of the abstractionists started to seem stale and academic. Young artists experiencing the turmoil of these years became less reticent about making direct references in their work to political issues.3

 Brent Roe's initial forays away from abstraction were toward images that had environmental and cold war references. In an early painting entitled Two Ways of Passing an Island (1980),4 Roe contrasted a benign storybook nature, represented by a whale swimming in one direction, to a malevolent humanity, represented by an air plane dropping a bomb, flying in the opposite direction.

 One painting in the Cambridge Galleries exhibition which may trace its roots to this earlier, political period in the artist's work is Dead Poor People (1992). On a swirling white ground a simply painted, thin black line frames an image of the earth, as seen from space. Below the black-line frame the artist inscribed the three words "dead poor people."

Dead Poor People may be about all of the people who have lived without having a monument in their name. Perhaps it is a cartoon of a memorial that questions the role of individuals and those we choose to memorialize. But what is political in this work is not so much an issue of current affairs as it is an issue of perception and the manipulation of symbols in general. The mere fact of being an artist in the 1990's is an implied rejection of mass marketed images of proscribed meanings and values. Every aspect of Dead Poor People is a rejection of the warm embrace of the production values and ideology of the corporate media environment.

Separated by a dozen years, Two Ways of Passing an Island and Dead Poor People describe not so much a political program as an aesthetic. It is a cultivated, naive, style of lazy, enervated lines, and weightless, schematically described, floating forms. In the 1980 painting, Roe renders the bomber a rubber child's toy. In the later painting, he contrasts the thinly painted floating earth with the baldly wooden epigram "dead, poor, people." Aimless painterly gestures are anchored by the goal oriented alliteration Perfectly Purposeful People (1995). An articulated phrase of corporate optimism, Rational Future, floats above a white surface tortured with scumbled black lines and etched with graffiti and tattoo like markings (1997).

Contemporary life is characterized by a universe of expanding emotional and perceptual complexity. If art is a politically redemptive act, it is not because it can instruct people. It is because aesthetics can model the existence of new forms and new perceptions and can validate our most elusive and tangled feelings. In Brent Roe's work we can describe an "aesthetic of ambivalence," where the authority of each statement or gesture is undermined by its opposite. It is an ironic, self-conscious aesthetic. It is informed by a knowledge of art history and an interest in the processes of perception. It is also an expression of the lived sense of the difficulty of making an unequivocally authoritative artistic statement.

 "In painting, make that experience of perception a real one, an honest one."5

With text and imagery constantly in a state of opposition these paintings cannot lead anywhere, or better said, they cannot lead to any other place than the paintings themselves. Titles such as Is (1993), Eternity Is Amongst Us (1995), Where It's At (1995), Less Is More (1996), and Is Often Desiring (1996) are notable in their use of intransitive verb constructions to this end.

The earliest paintings in the exhibition, Hi, Dead Poor People, and Fate (all 1992), Hidden Meaning, Aspirations, Awaken From Your Trance, and Is (all 1993) mark a break with previous, more densely painted work and call upon a simplified, almost minimalist aesthetic. These paintings all have in common a gesturally active, swirling, white painted ground above which hover texts and images. The painting Is shows the artist making reference to his heritage of abstract colour field and expressionist painting. In the middle of the white ground he has painted a cartoon of a colour field painting. It is a circle in a square, bisected diagonally and broken into the complimentary contrasting colours of red-green and blue-orange. In the centre of the cartoon he has painted the word "IS."

In Is Roe consciously combines the elements of gestural expressionist painting, which he associates with the unconscious, and colour field painting, which he associates with a pure retinal experience of colour and form. The text connects Roe to conceptual, text based and interventionist artists who critique the politics of language and mass media. Related in form, the innocent and disarming Hi achieves the same end with understatement and humour. A minimalist painting within a painting – a black outlined, yellow ochre square hovers again over the active white painted ground. Within it a purposefully painted diagonal black line moves from side to side to side. Dangling from the end of the line, contained within the shape of a droplet, is the word "Hi." It is an anti-message  – a minimalist, two letter greeting. Its "moment" is much like a touch on the sleeve. In tying these three historical movements together in these paintings Roe underlines their common goal. Namely, to create a fissure – a short-circuit in our programmed expectations -- to create an experience of the moment.

 The charts Bacon of Hope, Chart #1, and Chart #5 (all 1994) continue to employ the agitated white ground. Employing the pun to great effect in the Bacon of Hope, Roe has rendered a thinly painted slab of bacon surrounded by the words fertilizer, jazz, chips and sex. Like Hi, it is disarmingly banal, mundane. The summary, thin painting and the random references to apparently unconnected commodities like fertilizer and chips suggest the artist may be connected to a dangerously dissolute and entropic state.

 "Went out to buy some bacon one day and did a painting of a strip of bacon. It's about trying to find hope and having these disparate words floating around."6

Seven searching words resisted being a mistake, The world will not end any time soon, and Compost Your Theories (all 1994) make direct reference to the work of the American abstractionist Philip Guston. A Guston-like crosshatch of shaky, pastel brushstrokes again floats above the common swirling white ground. The Guston references are topped with a text icing that seems to struggle against the indeterminacy of the paint. The command "Compost Your Theories" and the affirmative "The World Will Not End Anytime Soon" struggle for authority on a shifting ground. The anti-message – unlike the conventional Cassandra, there is essentially nothing to report here – makes for a wistful painting. It is a post-adolescent, reality without angst.

"No point in behaving like things are going to end, because they won't."7

Where It's At, Perfectly Purposeful People, Expand Your Moment, Eternity Is Amongst Us, Real Meets Real, Decorative Sun (all of 1995), and Is Often Desiring, (1996) mark a stylistic change for the artist. The active white ground is replaced by a transparent polymer sizing over a raw canvas. The thin, hesitatingly transparent applications of paint have been replaced by solid opaque colours. The imagery and text still seem to float in the centre of the canvas. Speaking about the painting Where It's At, Roe relates the text to the act of painting and the viewer's experience of it in the moment, suggesting that "where it's at," is on the canvas, or perhaps in other words, "what you see is what you get." The text is a play on the well-known hipster saying, a kind of campy finger snapping, jive talking satire of academic art criticism.8

Soft on Space, Please Position Your Poetry Within These Parameters, and Less Is More, (all 1996), mark the artist's shift to acrylic paint and with it, a greater opacity and illustration board quality to the imagery. In these paintings the artist may be less involved with the act of painting and more interested in conceptual and perceptual issues. Less Is More is a flesh toned ground covered by scumbled white lines, pink lozenge forms and green dots. It features a central image which appears to be the content of a large blue lava lamp. It is skewered by black lines on the ends of which are supported candles and skulls and flames and red droplets. Floating in white biomorphic balloons is the text "less, is, more."

Beyond the immediate contrast of the functionalist credo with the spontaneous and emblematically kitschy, Less is More signals perhaps a new attitude by the artist toward the canvas. The figures and text in his most recent body of work Autodogmatic Trip (1996), Rational Future, Twin Heads of Yes and No, Together We Can Perfect the Moment, All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas, Strangely Content, and I Am Dreaming About Time (all 1997) seem etched into, or to exist within an enveloping space. The ground has become an ersatz body, a living organism. It is no longer a hypnotic swirl of paint -- it has become a torturous tangle -- literally a web in I Am Dreaming About Time. Roe's figuration has become less idiosyncratic too, resembling more the schematics of graffiti and the obsessions of adolescents who doodle on their notebooks, running shoes and jean jackets.

 Painting was, and always remained for Roe, about being alive to the chaotic, unmediated "moment", as the title of the painting Together We Can Perfect the Moment (1997) reminds us. Autodogmatic Trip features a tangled, scumbled and tattooed ground with the bare description of a recessional space. An articulated text, "auto-dog-ma-tic," is enclosed in biomorphic balloons. The word "TRIP" is constructed of three-dimensional block letters at various angles, inscribed with paisley, stripes and wavy coloured lines. Like cartoon figures, the letters seem to shake with energy. "Trip," and things "trippy" recall the descriptive slang of the drug culture of the late sixties. Mining our personal and cultural past for material, Roe uncomfortably reminds us of the explosive and introverted mind of both a personal and cultural adolescence. But what is "autodogmatic" about it? Maybe it is a neologism – a conflation of "dogma" and "autoerotic" – about the artist setting his own goals. Or maybe this "trip" is a voyage of solipsistic reverie.

Gordon Hatt

Notes

1."Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. . ."

Blaise Pascal, Selections from the Thoughts, ed. & trans. By Arthur H. Beattie, Northbrook: AHM Publishing, 1965, p. 30.

2. Interview with the artist, November 1997.

3. See "Discussion" and Clark, T. J., "More on the Differences between Comrade Greenberg and Ourselves," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Serge Guilbault and David Solkin, pp. 165-194,Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1981.

4. Exhibited in Artventure, The Royal Bank of Canada, Royal Bank Plaza, Toronto, July 10 - August 29, 1980.

5. Telephone interview with the artist, January 1998.

6. Telephone interview with the artist, November 1997.

7. Telephone interview with the artist, November 1997.

8. A parallel could be made with the street scam that goes something like this:

"Five dollars says that I know where you got your shoes."

            "You got your shoes on your feet."

Catalogue of works in the exhibition

1. Hi, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

2. Dead Poor People, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

3. Fate, 1992, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

4. Hidden Meaning, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

5. Aspirations, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

6. Awaken From Your Trance, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

7. Is, 1993, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

8. Bacon of Hope, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

9. Chart #5, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

10.          Chart #1, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

11.         Seven searching words resisted being a mistake, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

12.         The world will not end any time soon, 1994, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

13.         Compost Your Theories, 1994, oil on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

14.         Where It's At, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

15.         Perfectly Purposeful People, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

16.         Expand Your Moment, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

17.         Eternity Is Amongst Us, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

18.         Real Meets Real, 1995, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

19.         Decorative Sun, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

20.         Time to Rhyme, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

21.         Soft on Space, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

22.         Please Position Your Poetry Within These Parameters, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

23.         Less Is More, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

24.         Autodogmatic Trip, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

25.         Is Often Desiring, 1996, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

26.         Rational Future, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

27.         Twin Heads of Yes and No, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

28.         Together We Can Perfect the Moment, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

29.         All those seeking meaning line up behind this canvas, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 45.72 x 60.96 cm.

30.         Strangely Content, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

31.         I Am Dreaming About Time, 1997, acrylic on canvas, 60.96 x 60.96 cm.

J. Lynn Campbell: Offering

The following text is an edited transcript of a conversation between J. Lynn Campbell and Gordon Hatt in the artist’s studio on February 21, 1997.

I first conceived of this project in 1991 and have been collecting and wrapping tree branches and roots since that time. Offering was first exhibited as a work-in-progress at Workscene Gallery in Toronto in 1993. While continuing the wrapping, I have considered various options for the finished installation. It was about one year ago that the addition of the table and four chairs fulfilled the intent of the piece for me. The chairs have since changed to benches, each with a word inscribed on the seating surface. I feel it has now culminated fully.

GH: How long have you been using brass wire in your work?

JLC: I started using wire in 1989. It came about from a conscious decision to introduce various materials to realize a more tactile surface. I enjoyed the distinct physical qualities of the materials combined with the different physical demands each makes on the body as well as the mental exercise. It's the combination of the mental faculty and physical activity and what that may evoke on other levels of the psyche.

GH: Why brass wire?

JLC: I like the flexibility it offers as it easily follows the form of most objects. With Offering I am using 24-gauge soft wire which is still very strong. It is the linear quality that intrigues me most. The line suggests time, a continuum. A line is a series of dots joined together. One can imagine those dots as moments joined in a continuance of minutes, hours, days, weeks, years. So, the line of wire comes to symbolize the sequential lifeline.

GH What is the significance of the process of wrapping?

JLC: Much of my work is about process. This particular process of wrapping has the deliberate intent of slowly following the contour of an object, making one aware of every detail and the time it takes to be conscious of such details. The process becomes meditative. I start to think about the surface texture, shape, colour. I experienced the activity of wrapping and what that evokes. The material(s) and activity start to suggest various meanings. Wrapping something can imply an act of preservation. It is also suggestive of women's work and their activities which often embrace the concerns of family life on very fundamental levels: caring, nourishing, protecting.

GH: Is the wrapping of the wood a type of aesthetic appropriation, like claiming an interesting surface?

JLC: For me there is always an aesthetic consideration when conceiving and constructing my work. I am not sure about the word "appropriation", unless it is to mean the assignment of something to a special purpose. Then I would say yes, and extend that consideration to include any abstract component, symbolic experience, and what is the aesthetically real in the work's concrete elements. Offering can be accessed through the association brought about by symbol and metaphor. On a certain level there is a conscious selection or claiming of elements for a particular purpose. But there is always more below the surface. Again, this goes back to the process and what it reveals to me. The chosen elements in combination with the process present a possible starting point to link other levels of understanding. I believe most, if not all

things are connected on some level.

GH: The process of wrapping then relates to the tree branches and roots as connecting elements?

JLC: The limbs and roots have been separated from the original tree and, metaphorically speaking, these separate parts represent a reconstruction of the tree symbol as a totality. The tree is a symbol of the bare processes of life – growing and dying – processes that continue at a deep level. The tree also symbolizes the centre of life, fertility, knowledge and sacrifice. It is the whole manifested. Offering does function in a similar way to the conventional symbols of creation and recreation, death and renewal. The tree is the world in constant renewal and regeneration, the life principle. The continuance of the wrapping, symbolic of the life process, suggests the accumulation through time of our experience and knowledge of ourselves. Time unites the opposites: birth to death, youth to age, night to day, work to rest.

GH: Offering? What is the significance of the title?

JLC: JLC: Traditionally an offering is a thing presented or sacrificed in worship or devotion - something offered for acceptance, a gift. As individuals, our life experiences are a product of our action and effort and we share these experiences with others in many different ways. "Offering" or sharing is a way of giving thanks for what we have received. This sculptural installation and the process involved to complete the work was for me a way to explore how we "receive" and "give" during the course of understanding our conscious existence. The inquiries I put forth in doing my work are initially personally directed. From conscious existence. a connection with the audience? From the starting point and working outward, I hope to gain some objectivity and understanding of reality.

GH: Is there a link between the table and a desire to make a connection with the audience?

JLC: So much happens around the table. It has a rich association historically and symbolically. The table is where individuals friends and family come together to share a meal. It is where we talk and exchange ideas. It is a frame work where we gain nourishment physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. The table presents the opportunity for communication (the round table), where people discuss problems and treaties. The harvest table is traditionally used to lay out the season's yield in a celebratory fashion, to give thanks and share in the bountiful "gathering," The table, by its stability of form and clarity of function, connects and grounds our participation in this process of "receiving" and "giving."

GH: The Last Supper?

JLC: That too – an important event.

GH: Do you regard your objects as beautiful?

JLC: Yes - some of them. The visual aesthetic of the work is often purposeful and thereby important to its meaning.

GH: The branches and roots wrapped in the brass wire have a beautiful surface quality, they reflect the light wonderfully. The piece will look like fire. People will be attracted, and come closer and discover your process of making them.

JLC: The luminosity of the brass and its smooth, richly coloured surface is quite seductive and sensual. Although I am dealing with ideas and concepts, for me, art making involves all the senses. It becomes a bodily experience as well as an intellectual process. At times, the material will start to feed an idea. I think about the idea and try to expand it in different ways. An image starts to develop and with that image come certain sensations. I return to the material(s) and examine, experiment and determine which ones may best support the concept.

One consideration for exhibiting any of my works is the result of the process and what it has brought to light for me. This I want to share and would like to reach people on comparative levels. There are big questions and not so big questions about life. Whether I start with the big questions or the smaller ones, it still all connects. Sometimes I will use a visual technique that will draw the viewer in to disclose a detail or an intimacy about the work. Details are part of something larger. The considered overall form of the work pulls the viewer back to reflect on the larger countenance and meaning. My hope is that other people will be inspired as I have been.

GH: The desire to locate inspiration in the viewer is the same inspiration that you have?

JLC: I don't expect anyone to respond in the same way as I have experienced my own work or the work of others. Every viewer through their own experience will respond correspondingly. I have been inspired by artists whose professional accomplishments are very different from mine. The response I have to their work has changed me in some way. I consider it an advantage and privilege to be able to take away with me something previously unknown, unexplored or unrealized.

GH: Why is it important to make art today?

JLC: At times I ask myself, what would I do if I didn't make art. I don't know. Obviously, I enjoy the creative process and want to be involved. On some other level of being, I know I have to make art. It addresses some purpose and meaning outside what I consider conventional and routine. Life proposes many questions (as I see it) and this is a way for me to grapple with the puzzle.

So much is changing as we near the end of this millennium. The post-modern world is continually changing form, with unstable boundaries. Identity is no longer fixed by social role or tradition but rather made (and frequently remade) out of many cultural sources. Moral and ethical values are forged out of dialogue and choice. All of the world's cultural symbols are up for grabs with endless improvisations. Much has been undermined. There are times I find it painfully challenging and I struggle to understand. For me it is important to regain some sense of solid ground – to reclaim a sense of ownership of views, beliefs and identity. Living ought to inspire and offer hope - two things I would find difficult to live without

GH: Is the work you make an act of faith?

JLC: I think that is what art making or being an artist is. It is not a profession so much as it is an act of faith - something necessary to suspend disbelief.

Carlo Cesta: Romance Language

In his most recent exhibition, "Romance Language" at the Garnet Press in Toronto earlier this year (April 1996), Carlo Cesta unified the disparate influences and investigative paths that have characterized his work in the ‘90s.

Looking at Carlo Cesta's work over the years I have witnessed a consistent critical process at work. His critical method is at base visual and modernist: form is a fluid and elastic material for polymorphic play. He works, however, within the enlarged, post-modern understanding of form -- an associative, metonymical understanding -- where aesthetic qualities are inextricably bound up with symbolic and historical references. Pleasure in the manipulation of a form, in Cesta's work, is therefore also a process of transcending irony where representations are inverted, emptied and reinvested with meaning.

Cesta works in the places where art and utility meet -- where personal and group identities shape, and are shaped by contemporary urban, industrial culture. In the mid-80s with his monochromatic paintings of household appliances, he began an investigation into domestic symbols and the machinery of class. In the late 80s and early 90s, he began to explore the materials of skilled trade labour -- creating a non-objective, serial and bio-mechanical imagery. In a body of work entitled Industrial English (1994), Cesta began to make references to the Toronto Italian community in which he grew up, completing the triangle of class referents: family, occupation and ethnicity.

Romance Language juxtaposes the transcendental language of modernist form with the vernacular of class. The installation Romance Language (version) occupied the ground floor of the Garnet Press, and consisted of forty-one, two and three-dimensional biomorphic, geometric abstract and text-based works. Mounted floor to ceiling and wrapped around three walls, the installation recalled the early Suprematist installations. However, the wrought iron pieces, the sew-on fabric name badges, the texts phonetically transcribed in a fractured Italian-accented English, pointed in another direction. Instead of Suprematist aspirations of purity, infinity and the absolute we are back on earth, in Toronto's working class Junction Triangle to be specific, where there are no absolutes, only histories, contexts and provisional actions.

Cesta's sew-on, fabric name badges initially read as elegantly embroidered oval shapes. With a little bit of work the meaning of the words embroidered on the badges is eventually deciphered. These words and phrases are taken from a phrase book, compiled by former M. P. Charles Caccia in the 1950's, in which English words are approximated via Italian phonetics - i.e. to shovel becomes tu sciavol. The book was designed to assist recent immigrants in adjusting to their new environment; the texts refer to specific jobs, activities, tools and conditions that defined the working life of Italian immigrants to Canada in the 1950's and 60's. These are not abstract shapes, they are functional forms -- wash and wear class signifiers.

Fabric name badges are only one example of the very idiosyncratic media Cesta selects to communicate his ideas. The sheer variety of his materials and applications is staggering: adhesive foil tape, car underbody paint -- stencilled and etched -- mail box letters on sheet metal, polyurethane foam, tinted acrylic glass, melamine, and wrought iron to name only some. The materials are part of a sculptural kit of techniques and materials developed by Cesta requiring precise shaping and finishing.

One important and recurring form in Cesta's work is the gasket, the soft, flat material that acts as an interface where two metal engine parts meet. Cesta's gaskets are at once visual, rhythmic themes and emblems of trade labour. In Romance Language the cellular bio-organic form replicates, mutates, and evolves visually and symbolically. This metamorphic gasket may be a body-double for industrial humanity: a metaphor for the malleable, impressionable flesh of people caught in the gears of modern industry.

Carlo Cesta, Provisional Landscape, mixed media, 1996.

If modern industry was a functional model for the Suprematists through to the Minimalists, their aesthetic model was the laboratory. Sterile, removed of uncontrolled organic activity, the modern working space was the site of intellectual control, and of existential reflection. Provisional Landscape (in the upstairs space at the gallery) is an example of Cesta's method of introducing microbial viruses into the laboratory. The mixed media, wall mounted piece features a wooden disk with bevelled edges and punctured with small metal vents. Below this, a nickel plated horizontal structure looking a lot like a Donald Judd wall piece supports bottles of Mio orange soda pop. The disk is not abstract. It is vented -- it breathes. Hovering over a horizontal shelf it becomes part of a figurative landscape. Placing bottles of pop on the glossy polished shelf, Cesta plays the working class naive who mistakes a work of art for a piece of furniture. Poking fun at geometric abstraction and minimalist aesthetics, Cesta reveals Modernism as human and vulnerable -- a metaphorical construction.

The artist's most comprehensive statement to date, Romance Language is an exuberant gush of twisted, skewed, inverted, disassembled and reconstructed icons. It is also a densely layered meditation on personal, communal and social identity.

Gordon Hatt

from C Magazine, #51, October-December 1996, pp. 17-19.