Tom Austin wrote about the Cintas award and exhibition. Of the exhibition at the Frost Museum, Austin wrote “the quality of the work is wildly uneven.” He stated, in reference to Maria Martinez-Canas, “Hers is easily the best work in this year’s Cintas finalists’ exhibition.” And “Moreno’s work,…, has grown into something more complicated and visceral.”
The article’s statements in regards to Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova:
“Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova’s Two Sectionals Creating Closure may be too simple: The artist — who has previously created such pieces as A Gated Space for One, slabs of ornamental powder-coated aluminum welded together to form a conceptual cage — bought two stupendously mediocre imitation leather sectionals at El Dorado and simply pushed them together. Rodriguez-Casanova, who attended the New World School of the Arts in 1994 and ’95, is from Westwood Lakes in southwest Miami. He concedes that Two Sectionals didn’t require ”a lot of process,” but points out the bigger picture: “It’s a comment on my personal nostalgia, the life of the suburbs. And also a dialogue with the viewer about the importance society attaches to working class objects, and why the efforts of the working class are not as valued as the work of others.”
There has been a discussion, here at TNFH Central, about the recent works of LRC. Though, it has not concluded; we have come to perceive the recent works by LRC haven’t always deliver its intended poetics. I believe the systems and rules used by LRC to form and generate works are sound and conceptually attractive. But in the final hours of the executions of works like Two Sectionals, I believe LRC allows Duchampian readymades to overly influence the works. By that I mean the idea that readymades are simply found and are coupled and are exhibited. This is in contrast to Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s brand of readymades, in which objects are manipulalted , abstracted and shaped into a work.
Two Sectionals Creating Closure is a very poetic phrase. For one thing, I think of the ying-yang. Another thought is of matrimonial unity. One can go on…
