Roberto Cabot

From Aug 14 to Sep 11 2004

The current painting work by Roberto Cabot sets intersection points between the universe of the machine ? with their controllable appliances ? and the emotional world, with all the disorderliness of its yearnings, creating a transversal space that ambiguously partakes of mathematics and chaos.

The quality of such painting lies in the act of establishing an imaginary spatial net that subverts the idea of mechanical kinetics, despite having transited through digital operations that, as a principle, would suppose some mechanized optical field. His challenge therefore is to propose a space in motion that overflows from the original programed net and that disfigures the image into unexpected projections.

The work is not restricted to conferring mechanical mobility to abstract forms nor to ironizing the traditional constructive grid but it incorporates the paradox of unpredictability into the kinetic field. The unpredictable, however, instead of entirely de-articulating its flux, imposes itself as a vital and motoric deviation which re-creates this same flux within a novel gravitational field.

As the optical field is launched in waves of unpredictable moments ? rendered problematic by a spectral duplication of the shadows ? the space of the painting gets blurred and extrapolates the perimeter of the image itself, dislocating itself to somewhere in between the planes, in an undefinable topology.

The object in Cabot's painting is the eyesight phenomenon itself and with it, the slips into illusionism and trompe l'oeil. The eye is fooled when the spatial logic of the painting induces it to realize what is not there, or when it provokes visual incidents that disturb the references that we believe they exist for our definition of space. Thus, illusionism is a cunning play with the eyesight that hurls us into an impossible physical reality. In a certain sense, Cabot?s task is to give credibility to this stratagem. By using the resource of trompe l?oeil, in which the play of the double and the shadows is fundamental, the artist does not create the illusion of reality in the painting but, on the contrary, he affords pictorial, and therefore, physical reality to a fluid and phantasmic space that dodges the temporal mesh of continuous motion.

In another work carried out in parallel with the paintings and whose mention is nothing short of necessary, Roberto Cabot transports the same principles that have oriented him in the canvases and in the drawings to the sculptural field. His "reflection machine", a device built by the artist himself ? a multi-mirrored wooden structure, a synthesis and metaphor of the very process of painting. There, the "windows" of the mirrors open up for a fragmentation of the real space, cutting out slices of other external spaces to incorporate them into that space, as if they belonged there. The machine becomes then the locus of discontinuity ? the accidental, the unpredictable ? due to a spectral twisting that not only muddles our spatial perception, but that contradicts the actual definition of machine. According to the artist, the device, understood as ?a multiplier of light and an unfoldment of the eyesight?, expands, as much as the paintings do, the optical field of the image beyond its boundaries, presupposing deviations and movements that undo the orderliness and determination of the machine, indicating the contretemps that are remindful of the surprising drawbacks of life, as it is.

Unpredictable kinetic areas, Cabot?s works set a face-to-face dialogue with Helio Oitocica's Metaesquemas, for whom the space has always been mutable and subjected to continuous dislocations.

Oiticica wished to dissect space, saturating it in quasi-mathematical exercises that would drive him to the core of planarity. But the concept of plane, in the Metaesquemas, never excluded the idea of spatial fluctuation as if the color patches of geometric cutouts would always foretell a physical and mobile articulation in space. One might construe the Metaesquemas as a sort of an aerial view of what would later get materialized as the Bilaterais and the Núcleos ? volumes suspended in the air, de facto.

Vibrational spots of color and light, the plays with planes as in the Metaesquemas, get converted in Cabot's work into the pure lines that separate them, as if he had re-invigorated the spaces in between ? the hollows, the intervals ? upgrading them into the status of wholeness. These are the lines that will perform the luminous moments and take up color, as if the "background" in Oiticica had become some living element ? the act and structure of painting.

The extension and duration throbbing at the extremities of Cabot?s paintings ? one of them is actually overspilling onto the wall space ? refer to the same multiplying and unrestrained effect of Oiticica?s planes, to the same fluctuating mesh. The works bearing the title Helioremix represent not only an homage to the master, but also a noteworthy re-interpretation of his "structural dilution". They both seem concerned about turning the constructive legacy into a complex spiritual activity, where technical utopia bows to the imponderable, where rigidity of geometry takes on the elasticity of time.

Ligia Canongia