VIEW OF OFFICE BAROQUE (AFTER GORDON MATTA-CLARK)

View of Office Baroque (After Gordon Matta-Clark) is one of Annie Cabigting's most outstanding and progressive series of works to date. Cabigting has an uncanny prescience for exploring unlooked for spaces and objects, such as the reverse of the Mona Lisa or the visual result of a destroyed Francis Bacon. Often her paintings portray paintings under scrutiny - an act of transference between the viewpoint of the immediate viewer of Cabigting's work, into that of the viewer within Cabigting's canvas. Taking the form of a circular shaped canvas, this radical composition explores and pays homage to conceptual artist and architect Gordon Matta-Clark who became famous for his works in abandoned buildings and warehouses. Office Baroque, an avant-garde site-specific project undertaken by Matta-Clark in 1977, involved physically cutting through a five-story Antwerp office building. This act was seen as that of artistic intervention in an unwanted, leftover urban space. Inspired by overlapping teacup rings left on a drawing, the carving was organized around two semi-circles that sliced through the floors, creating teardrop and rowboat shapes at their intersection.
In this way, Cabigting's homage to Matta-Clark can be seen as an intervention of an intervention - overlapping their dual artistic practices, the way Matta-Clark intended with his overlapping teacup rings - by making permanent upon her canvas something which was intended to be temporal, abandoned, and specific to its location. By contrast, Cabigting's canvas as a movable object is not site specific. It takes the scene of Office Baroque from one unfixed location to another; inverting Matta-Clark's intent and suffusing it with the reflexive introspection of Cabigting's methodology.