TREE SURGEON by Robert L. Pincus (Printed October 8th, 2009 San Diego Union Tribune)
Labeling art is sometimes a useful shorthand form of thinking. But it can also be a sign of flabby thought.
Take that well-worn term “conceptual art.” It has been applied to lots of different kinds of work in recent years, so much so that it becomes of less and less use.
Roman de Salvo’s inventive work is rich with ideas and idiosyncratic media, so this description has been applied to his work often, going back to the early 1990s. And yet the label fits uneasily with his art.
Consider this typical definition of it from Webster’s Dictionary: “an art in which the ideas of the artist are more important than the means used to express them.” Applying it to de Salvo’s art doesn’t quite work.
There is a generally a controlling idea. But he’s also a superb maker of things, whether his material is electrical conduit or whether it’s wood, as in his current exhibition at Quint Contemporary Art.
The works in this show — with its alliterative title, “Split, Splice, Splay, Display” — pick up where he left off with his large-scale permanent public work of 2006, “Nexus Eucalyptus,” installed on the site of the CalTrans District 11 headquarters in Old Town. The construction of the piece was a feat of engineering, in which he turned massive branches into a kind of seamless network resembling a roadway system.