Dario Robleto: Life, Left to Struggle in the Sun

September 5 – October 18, 2014

This series is a homecoming of sorts for the artist.  After extended investigations into the “logic of loss,” the human urge to create, the therapeutic aspects of crafts, and the Civil War works that unified all these themes in an American Victorian sensibility, Robleto has returned to his vinyl collection.  Over the years, and especially in his early work, Robleto’s extensive collection of records acted as both subject matter and sculptural material.

The Sky, Once Choked With Stars, Will Slowly Darken, 2011, is a suite of eight archival digital prints (44 x 44 inches each, with an image size of 39 x 39 inches, printed on Epson Somerset Velvet paper), in an edition of 5 with 1 AP.

The prints started as cover images from the live albums of various now-deceased musicians, all posed, as is customary for live albums, on-stage and under lights.  Robleto has digitally removed the musician, the text, and any other extraneous information, leaving only the lights.  Without their “star” to illuminate, the lights become stars themselves, assuming the otherworldly magnitude of Hubble deep-space photographs.

As aesthetically distinct from the Civil War works as they may be, these prints clearly share an elegiac quality with that body of work that extends Robleto’s treatment of loss, both personal and cultural.  Here, as there, the body of the departed is palpable in its absence.  But in these works that absence is accented with more recent disappearances: the obsolescence of vinyl records; the widely reported digital “death of the album”; and the memories attached to both the artifacts and the performances themselves.  And yet, as an ardent and long-time music fan, Robleto knows better than most that the relationship between performer and audience is reciprocal.  Stardom is as much a function of the fans as of the star.  Nowhere is that more audibly evident than the live album.  Robleto’s erasure, while mourning the performer, also celebrates the context in which that performer shone most brightly: a communal moment of empathy, orchestrated perhaps by the musician, but built, felt and sustained by everyone who was there.

Robleto himself best summarizes the correlation between his life-long love of music and his life-long interest in astronomy:

“I was as captivated by the peripheral images of light and stage set-up on the album covers as I was by what might lie beneath the haziness of the planetary and stellar images coming from NASA.  These early memories become intertwined in such a way that I have always understood the musical stage and outer space as similar cycles of evolution: birth, youth, death, re-birth.”