KÖLN, GERMANY.- Galerie Brigitte Schenk will present Roberto Cabot / Installation / Painting, on view through October 26, 2006. Nothing characterizes better European Modernity, this apogee of Western Cartesian thought, than the principle of the rectangular grid - as evinced in the works of Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd or the architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. Embodying the great European achievement of uncompromising rationality, the principle of the grid is absolute and eternal. Yet paradoxically this mode of thought fails to identify the danger visually evoked by the grid; namely, the danger of becoming imprisoned by the rational.

The Brasilian Artist Roberto Cabot (1963) presents after several solo- and groupshows in Brasil in the last years (lately Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro) his first soloexhibition in the gallery Brigitte Schenk in Cologne.

Cabot transforms the mondrianic static in its uncompromisingly rigid grid into an elastic net which expands and contracts as it unfolds like a wave in a never-ending undulating flowing motion across the walls of the room. This net neither lends structure to the room not renders it finite. Like a spider’s web, single filaments spread over the walls, conveying the illusion of spatial depth where none is, and obfuscating depth where it exists. These lines generate a space which is neither static not finite. Just as in daily life, these spaces flow into each other, changing direction unexpectedly. Illusion dominates the space; a network camera linked to the computer and the Internet captures the viewers, and then throws the captured image onto the wall in the foyer, ensuring that the viewers see themselves only as they depart. But where is the camera located? And in what room does it capture the viewers? The real, experiential space becomes virtual, and the virtual space expands the real one; they too flow into each other. Participating in this game of illusions is the camera, a technical device invented to elucidate the world and deconstruct it into its individual components. (Noemi Smolik).