Searching for Romberg: Art and Interactivity in the Work of Osvaldo Romberg

This book results from the Slought Foundation conference on artist Osvaldo Romberg, held at the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2001. Contributors to this volume include Gregory Flaxman, Reinaldo Laddaga, Robert Mahoney, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Osvaldo Romberg, and Marjorie Welish. This means in some way (we must try) to sense again the pleasure of painting, to paint the painting, to try to define again and again in each work, what is the essence of painting. Art is unverifiable, we can merely approach it through exercises, which sometimes surmount their own limits and provides us with a mystique of expression if we are artists, and a mystique of perception if we are observers. - Osvaldo Romberg, pp. 129 "Romberg’s work has passed through quite a number of stages, from the more analytic moment of the famously didactic chromatic value tables presented as so many "explicitations" of famous paintings, to a more synthetic and architectonic moment with the modelizations of churches and sacred spaces, and its dynamism has not stopped. Without attempting to foresee where it will go so as to expand and engage with our "post-medium" condition, to take up Krauss’s useful category, a category, let us note, elaborated in a discussion of a multi-media artist like Marcel Broodthaers, I would simply like to pause and stress the subjective position that both enables and frames this type of work. It is in this selfless or egoless egotism of the work as work that I can become one not with the artist, not with the Romantic myth of the genius, who from Picasso to Pollock still seduces once in a while, but with the work as it presents itself in its simplicity, purity and elegance. Then and only then can I "accompany" it, like for instance by humming once more, in a slightly lower scale: "Non.... Rrien, rrien de rrien, je ne rregrette rrien... Ni le bien, ni le mal, Tout ça m’est bien égal! ... Et demain je rrecommence à zéro...." - Jean-Michel Rabaté, pp. 54-55