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“Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.” – Aristotle

Quint Contemporary Art is pleased to announce a group exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs, video and mixed media works by artists Birgir Andrésson, Adam Belt, Stephen Curry, Roman de Salvo, Andy Diaz Hope in collaboration with Laurel Roth, Iran do Espírito Santo, Vernon Fisher, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Maiko Haruki, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Roy McMakin, Lincoln Schatz and James Turrell. The exhibition, DISSECTING NATURE, will open with a public reception on Saturday, January 14 from 6 to 8 PM.

Dissecting Nature is an exhibition of artwork that uses man-made materials to emulate nature or natural materials to create artistic constructions.

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Look forward to celebrating with you all soon!

Quint Contemporary Art will be participating in this year’s ART SAN DIEGO | Contemporary Art Fair. Come by and visit us at booths 25 & 33!

September 2 – 5, 2010
Hilton San Diego Bayfront San Diego, CA

ADAM BELT | MEL BOCHNER | KELSEY BROOKS | STEPHEN P. CURRY | ROMAN DE SALVO | MANNY FARBER | THOMAS GLASSFORD | JAY JOHNSON | JEAN LOWE | KIM MACCONNEL | RYAN MCGINNESS | JOHN MCLAUGHLIN | ROY MCMAKIN | TAVARES STRACHAN | and more!

La Jolla The instructional drumbeat of this show’s title—“Split, Splice, Splay, Display”—characterizes well the transparency and humor of Roman de Salvo’s best work. It describes in the most abbreviated manner the steps he takes to transform raw material (in this case, wood) into finished sculpture, and delivers the alliterative terms with a showman’s wink. De Salvo has a bit of the carnival barker’s performative flair (“It slices, it dices . . . ”) in addition to the patience and diligence of a fine craftsman.

For each of the six new pieces in this show (all 2008 or ’09), he split and segmented tree branches, recombining them into wall-mounted sections of tracery. The cut sides of the wood face out, and have been sanded so they read as smooth, continuous planes. That continuity is a coy illusion, since the spline joints (slender strips of wood inserted and glued into grooves cut into the ends of both joined pieces) that connect the sections are fully visible, and neither the grain patterns nor the width of the segments matches up precisely. De Salvo flaunts the artifice of his constructions while teasing organic-looking patterns from them. In Filter, Chinese elm branches are made to look like the veins of a giant (36-by-86-inch) double-stemmed leaf. In Delta Tissue, the slim lines of wood define a cluster of irregular rounded shapes suggestive of a cellular network or the residue of an agglomeration of bubbles.

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.