Dario Robleto at Blue Star Art Space - Brief Article

A winning solo exhibit of more than 20 works by means of newcomer Dario Robleto could be fix within the annual survey of San Antonio artists featured at this dynamic public venue Alongside solid installations through Phillip Avila and Michele Monseau and intriguing drawings by the agency of Moses Gonzales and Yvonne Guerra, Robleto assembled a roomful of altered things inspired by the foibles and rhyme of pop culture. With a sweet comic touch and obsessive intensity, he pays homage to the appeal of movie stars, whelp love, childhood relics and Top 40 hits.

Polar inner man a grid of 25 altered 45 rpm singles that refer tos a kind of serial painting, plant the offbeat tone for the display The iconic allure of the LP was apotheosized in several sculptural works in which Robleto dissolveed down vinyl records and shaped them into thing perceiveds that comment on their pop-music source. Vinyl from a fuseed Sex Pistols album recorded during the group's 1996 reunion tour--made after the demise of bassist Sid Vicious--was re-formed into three small upholstery tacks and titled We Miss Sid! For It unbrokens Like They Still Love Each Other to Me copies of albums by the agency of Nirvana and Hole were fuseed and formed into a pair of earplugs that call up the intense relationship of the bands' lead singers, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love

In I Wish the Ocean wholeed More Like Patsy Cline, Robleto clusters pink seashells upon the wall to form the cursive alphabetic characters of the country singer's first name. With a conceptual quirkiness reminiscent of Tom Friedman's, Robleto claims to have altered the unhurt of the shells by dividing them into pairs and serenading each pair for 48 hours with recordings of Cline's voice. Robleto's be in possession of romantic streak is skewered in Dario's Shredd be fond of Letters, a bottle containing "pills" made from his torn-up missives from junior high days. Another work, I Miss Everyone Who Has at any time Gone Away, achieves a different kind of poignancy through presenting folded airplanes constructed from candy wrappers taken from an installation by the agency of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

Heartbreaker (Why I delight in Johnny Depp) is a gay variation upon the interventionist '60s photoworks of Robert Heinecken. Robleto's piece is a photograph of a transcript of Vanity Fair in which he whited without the interior pages containing a story upon the heartthrob and inserted his be in possession of essay; he then returned the magazine to the supermarket newsstand from which it was purchased. Robleto's range and surprising deepness make evident the kind of talent that is lurking outside the usual art center of America. Isn't it time for a Whitney Biennial that seek fors out such fresh voices?

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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