March 1 – March 30, 2002
For his latest exhibition at the gallery, San Francisco-based artist, Lewis deSoto, will present a sculptural installation in three parts; each stemming from the contradiction inherent in his having been raised a Roman Catholic and then later turning to the teachings of the Buddha.
The End of Desire consists of filling one room of the gallery with cocoa bean shells, spread out on the floor in abundance, resembling a landscape. This installation evokes a reverie, elicited by the potent smell of chocolate, about the nature of desire. The concept of desire, its atmosphere of omnipresence in our lives, is an awareness made physical within this space. In Buddhism, desire is seen as a source of anxiety in our lives, yet the paradoxical situation is that if we wish to reject desire we first have to invoke it. Our aversion becomes desire again. In some Christian doctrines, desire can be seen as sinful, even without action or intent.
La Cena Pasada (The Last Supper) is the sculptural model for an immense future project: a collection of thirteen customized cars, representing Christ and the twelve apostles. Like early images of the Buddha, which depicted him only as the empty cart on which he rode, deSoto has chosen empty automobiles to represent the participants of the Last Supper, adopting the colors and composition of Leonardo’s fresco as an archetype. And, as in certain of California’s ‘car culture,’ where one’s vehicle signifies the persona of it’s owner, in Cena la Pasada, Judas’s betrayal is evidenced in his choice of a supercharged Ford over his colleagues’ 1960s General Motors models.
Memoriam is a series of minimalist prints in which deSoto examines memory and space. The works are created in a computer, with each piece representing a house or space in which the artist lived. Walls and arrangements of rooms are constructed by memory and placed in a color field. Included among the six works is ‘Camera Obscura,’ a text/image work that describes the architecture of memory, and the impossibility of rendering an experience as an image.