Steve Roden

The work of this Californian artist are a series of victorious gambles about the relationships between form, colour, and music. In a certain sense we could say that Roden has, through “internal resonance”, managed to fulfil Kandinsky’s aim of using music as a model for the language of art. But in fact the game becomes far more complex in its balance between its intermedial aspects and reciprocal allusions. The “translation” levels the artist invents in work after work are never intended to follow a code nor to become imprisoned in a single formula. They keep all the expressive and combinatory freedom of direct and spontaneous works. We are never aware of anything particularly ‘constructed’, even though it is clear that Steve Roden has, in over ten years activity, acquired a sophisticated and mature linguistic capacity.