Poetry is an electrical discharge
Vicente Huidobro
The recent work of Carlo Cesta marks a departure from working
exclusively with traditional art media in favour of their use and combination
with industrial and domestic materials. His inclusion of new media seem at once
to compliment and to contradict his constructed images: hot and cold,
technological and handmade, organic and mechanistic, the pieces seem caught
between two magnetic forces. Aluminum foil tape, rubberized undercoating,
aluminum and steel plate combined with graphite, oil stick and paper are the
material from which he generates two dimensional images that are a semi-abstract,
semi-recognizable hybridization of technological hardware and organic life
forms. His work is born both out of a natural love and curiosity for the
natural and constructed world and a critical, rigorous approach to the problem
of art making. As such, it is the specific culmination of many historical and
contemporary issues in art.
The material image is a contradiction in terms and a synthesis of
opposites. An image, after all, is a representation, a reflection or a
projection of something that is material. We think of an image of something or
someone, or, we simply imagine something. As a noun or a verb, the concept of
image and imagine are transitive terms - always leading somewhere else.
Material on the other hand is inert and concrete. Perceivable by the senses, it
refers to nothing other than itself. We can see and touch the material of an
image but the image itself remains in that illusive realm of knowledge,
perception and recognition.
So it is, that material is the lens through which we receive an image.
The paradigm in art for the lens as a transmitter of images lies in Renaissance
perspective - perspective meaning literally "to see through." It is
perhaps no coincidence that parallel to the development of perspective in the
Renaissance was the development of oil painting and the methodical laying of
transparent colour glazes through which an image was eventually realized.
Seeing through the material, and entering the world of a higher order was the
method and the goal.
There is, however, another, older tradition, in which the material of
image making is in itself meaningful. Medieval icons, biblical illuminations
and liturgical wares employed precious metals in the creation of the image.
Halos, details and surrounding space were gilded to enhance the rarity and
preciousity of the depicted image, but also, to act as a metaphor. Gold, for
example, was seen as symbolic of the sun and its reflective light was likened
to spiritual illumination.
Bright is the noble
work; but being nobly bright the work
Should brighten the
minds so that they may travel,
through the true lights
-
Abbot Suger of St. Denis
In the gilded medieval icon, the material bestowed values and meanings
to the image and in return, the image lent a particular significance to the material.
The interrelationship between material and image was largely abandoned during
the Renaissance in favour of scenic narratives, and was not again reconsidered
as an expressive possibility in picture making until the Cubist explorations of
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the first and second decades of this
century.
The Cubists, with their pioneering mixed media collages, were soon
followed by the Italian Futurists and the Dadaists in bringing to the picture
surface materials other than traditional drawing and painting media. In
diametrical opposition to the preciousness and rarity of the gilded icons,
however, mixed media collages and montages employed the valueless ephemera of
daily life: newspaper clippings, wallpaper swatches and chair caning were some
of the original collage materials. Picasso and Braque, through the combination
of painted image, printed word and material object invited the viewer to piece
together an image similar to the picture we construct of the world through the
reading of a newspaper or the creation of a scrap book. Their interest was not
in enhancing the authority of the image, but to destroy it, to reveal it as
constructed, complex and conditional. Influenced by contemporary notions of
relativity they wanted to reflect a modern world of simultaneous impressions
and fragmented information. The notion of a single image as a representative
expression of experience or understanding was challenged and in it's place all
that remained was a collection of perceptual, conceptual and material
fragments.
It is no coincidence that the Futurists and the Dadaists, who were
influenced by the collage aesthetic of the Cubists, turned to the machine as a
subject in their art. For it was the machine, or, more correctly, technology
itself, which had contributed most to the modern understanding of time and
space. The telescope, the steam engine, the telegraph and the photomechanical
reproduction fundamentally changed people's conception and experience of the
world. Images of mechanical parts, machines and other human devices, for the
Futurists and the Dadaists, formed an anti-romantic image of the fragmented
universe in which humanity's engagement in the natural world was reflected in
its tools. Mechanized human figures and anthropomorphic machines posited the
paradox of western society; namely, that while people often felt depersonalized
and devalued in the face of a technological world, machines were also
essentially human extensions. Because in the end, technology is the
representation of human labour and the image of human desire. We are the
technology. Our technology is us.
It is some distance from the cut and paste collages of the Cubists,
Futurists and Dadaists to Carlo Cesta's elegant muffler tape swirls and gasket
stencils. The old Cubist collages and montages had by comparison the nervous,
jittery energy of a Model "T" Ford. Cesta's collages are radically
refined and pared down. Their material composition can as little as rubberized
undercoating on aluminum or graphite and tape on paper, to more complex
combinations of materials. There is a unifying force behind these images, which
reminds one much more of the medieval icon than a 1920's collage or montage.
Cesta encourages us to revel in the mysteries of the materials; the contrasts
of the almost mystical, illuminating reflective tape against the torn and
scuffed paper or on oxidized and rusting steel, the primary black stencil
images of gaskets on the hypnotically buffed aluminum plate. His materials are
like polished gemstones laid into the crown of a depicted deity.
The deity which Cesta describes is the two headed god Technology. It is
not the half human, half machine god of the Dadaists. It is more pervasive than
that. Cesta's god Technology is half electrode, half vegetal. It is a god at
once more benign and more frightening than any Frankenstein. The artist's works
have a material seductiveness and organic fulsomeness that suggest
transcendental radiance and natural regenerative growth -- powerful material
and graphic metaphors. At the same time his images suggest an organic life that
is rationalized into the crystalline forms of technological systems. It is not
human personality that is affected by technology in Cesta's visions, but human
cell structure itself. The artist describes a world in which technology
flourishes while organic life petrifies..
Efflorescing leaf springs, sprouting antennae, bouquets of resonators,
daisy chains of engine gaskets in Carlo Cesta's work pose the paradox of a
natural technology and a technological nature. He contrasts beneficient images
of natural growth and communication with electromagnetic plants and rubberized
organisms -- images that are the very picture of a despoliating and denaturing
technology.
Carlo Cesta's process, imagery and materials chart a complex attitude
toward nature and technology, home, work and culture. These are transcendent
images, which take the viewer from the component parts and industrial
by-products of daily life to the core of its strangely familiar spirit -- and
back again, to the material image.
Gordon Hatt, April 1991
The Library & Gallery, Cambridge, Ontario
April 28 - May 25, 1991
