
Steve Roden
Sol LeWitt began his 1969 “Sentences on Conceptual Art” with the following gem: “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” In a series of thirteen paintings titled “the silent world” (all works 2004), Steve Roden reveals “mystic truths” by running the title of Jacques Cousteau’s first book through a word-to-image transposition of his own devising, arriving at a postlinguistic epistemology of painterly sensation. The cryptic means are less important than the pulsatory results: In these densely mapped small to medium-size canvases,