Fragments of a Mind: Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004

Whether SAINT CLAIR CEMIN is pondering the definition of art or the role perception, language, experience, craft, and ideas play in it, we always get the feeling, in Fragments of a Mind: Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004, that he is ultimately in dialogue with the diverse and legendary spirits of his homeland, or that he himself, as a sculptor of international repute, has simply become a gaucho from his own Brazilian South, carving a piece of wood while telling us a ghost story. For, in the end, whether he is theorizing about the historical significance of statues or hypothesizing the existence of chimera in his essays, aphorisms, letters and reminiscences in Fragments of a Mind, he seems always to be encouraging in the most graceful way "a lack of manners as the part of the unconscious" and to foster the greatest possible pleasures in a guiltless playground of memory, iconography, and the most basic emotion. Saint Clair Cemin was born in Cruz Alta, Brazil, in 1951. He studied at the École Nationale Superiore des Beaux Arts in Paris, France, in 1975, and moved to New York in 1978, to live and work. His sculptures have been exhibited worldwide in such museums and museum exhibitions as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam); the 1989 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (New York); Documenta IX (Kassel), 1992; Kunsthalle (Basel); the 22nd São Paulo Bienal, 1994; and The Menil Collection, 1999. He has had one-person museum shows at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico; The Arts Club of Chicago; and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. He is represented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City. Fragments of a Mind: Stories and Comments on Art 1987-2004 is the artist's first book of writings. A monograph on his work, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta by Richard Milazzo, was published in 2005.