Page 20 - Julia Cseko the Rant series

But if you play it right, it becomes a fertile ground for thinking.
The rst triptych is unapologetic, dealing with the reality of paying the bills as an artist. Being an artist is hard, takes stamina, but not all horrible. The second triptych dwells on “How did I get here?” I dove into a personal archeology–a term coined by professor Simone Michelin–and I found that when I was seventeen, two shows by very di erent artists inspired me to study art.
JT: And they were?
JC: Bispo do Rosário and Luciano Fabro. Rosário was a proli c
naïf artist, committed to a mental institution for most of his life. Fabro came from the tradition of Arte Povera–rigorous, methodic, majestic!
JT: Were you attracted to any pieces in particular?
JC: Fabro has a piece where he engraved a life-size drawing of himself onto a monolithic marble cylinder, which is rolled over cacao powder, generating a print onto the cacao using the marble as the “printing plate.” The title of the piece is “Sisyphus.”
JT: So you liken your body of work to rolling a boulder up a hill? JC: Pretty much! But the point of Fabro’s piece is that it’s not
all a burden. Or, that there is beauty in that burden.
JT: Right. It’s not all black and white, like the rst triptych.
JC: Yes, there are gray areas added to the narrative by the
second triptych. By the silver paintings, the tone changes from “Damn this is heavy” to “I think I like rolling this boulder up the hill.” By the gold triptych, the tone is con dent: "I don’t care how many times I have to roll this boulder, I fucking love doing it.”
JT: So when it says “I am the present tense of evolution” that’s the painting talking?
JC: Yes. When the paintings ask questions, it’s not just me personally asking them but also the painting stating “I need you (the viewer) in order to exist.” I’m questioning the idea that art is static. Lygia Clark, one of my earliest references, talks about this sort of call and response even if it’s an afterthought.
JT: The biggest thing that stuck out to me about the last triptych is that the whole vocabulary changes.
JC: The gold triptych presents a macro point of view “Whoa, I can see the whole planet, the galaxy, the cosmos!” The word choice responds to those di erent perspectives.
JT: Scale is a funny thing to talk about with these paintings because they’re all the same size, but the perspective of the “narrator” widens throughout the sequence.
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