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Lot Essay
Saint Clair Cemin, Brazilian-born, New York artist, has produced work ranging broadly in style and media, praised as a mixture of heroic and cartoonish imagery imbued with literary references. Through his work, Cemin projects his belief in the empowerment of the object to address issues of perception, beauty and originality. While carving, molding or sculpting, Cemin faces a set of issues related to the physical process of creating the object to ultimately invoke from the viewer refreshed conceptions of memory, the sublime and the history of modern man. The present eleven-foot tall cast aluminum sculpture titled Toy dates from the period following the artist’s rise to prominence in the 1980s New York art scene.
Cemin’s Brazilian background and integration in the forefront of New York’s flourishing contemporary art scene combined to introduce his own artistic voice. As Barbara A. MacAdam has noted, “Saint Clair Cemin communicates through his quirky works like a well-educated foreigner. His vocabulary, sophisticated and informed, is often not readily decipherable. We can almost understand his wit, his references to art history, to antiquity, to popular culture, but they are slightly skewed. We can’t be certain what they are and where they come from” (“Saint Clair Cemin: Cheim & Read” in ARTnews, June 2002, p. 119).
The sinuous lines of the present Toy contrast against the clear horizontal delineations that separate each colorful geometric element. Together, the formal elements of this totemic work transform a recognizable cultural image into a permanent, magnified fixture that celebrates order and balance. Critic Donald Kuspit has stated that Cemin is “often juxtaposing the raw and the refined, as though proposing some alchemical transformation of the former into the latter while maintaining their contrast” (“Saint Clair Cemin: Cheim & Read” in Artforum, May 2002).
Cemin’s Brazilian background and integration in the forefront of New York’s flourishing contemporary art scene combined to introduce his own artistic voice. As Barbara A. MacAdam has noted, “Saint Clair Cemin communicates through his quirky works like a well-educated foreigner. His vocabulary, sophisticated and informed, is often not readily decipherable. We can almost understand his wit, his references to art history, to antiquity, to popular culture, but they are slightly skewed. We can’t be certain what they are and where they come from” (“Saint Clair Cemin: Cheim & Read” in ARTnews, June 2002, p. 119).
The sinuous lines of the present Toy contrast against the clear horizontal delineations that separate each colorful geometric element. Together, the formal elements of this totemic work transform a recognizable cultural image into a permanent, magnified fixture that celebrates order and balance. Critic Donald Kuspit has stated that Cemin is “often juxtaposing the raw and the refined, as though proposing some alchemical transformation of the former into the latter while maintaining their contrast” (“Saint Clair Cemin: Cheim & Read” in Artforum, May 2002).