ROLAND CABOT, A MULTI-FIELD ARTIST
(translated from Spanish)

Considering the trajectory of Roland Cabot I will say that he is an example to be followed considering the many registers of his work which give to it an exceptional meaning.
Isn’t one of the advantages of Contemporary Art to allow all kinds of ideas, projects, solutions and results?
As I neither like to be mistaken nor to mislead the others when the question is analyzing and presenting to the public the whole of a trajectory, whatever his formal language or the nature of its contents are, I will seek to be objective.

In the case of R.C. his personality jumps to the eyes. His multi-field work evokes an emblematic world full of emotions, satisfactions and anguishes. His sculpture makes us think of architectures and his graphic work, extremely personal and of great acuity, seams to me close of the best representatives of the European tradition.

It is known that the work of R. C. is a symbiosis between a set of architectural volumes and the agility and precision of his graphic work. This appears completely true to me. R.C., in his manner of understanding sculpture plays with the structures, the matters and the colors. A whole integrating play, specific to the “assembler” he is, where nothing is unwarranted, out of context or affected by the various “isms”.

I believe in the work of Roland Cabot and I also believe in what we can call a “well done” work. In addition, nothing would have any meaning if the lines or volumes were based on strict concepts. What counts are the solutions that the personality of the artist imposes, his imagination, his freedom of action and expression as well as the gestures which result from it and which are the core of his life.

Jaime Soler i Magriña
Barcelona, July 2001
Historian, Curator of the National Art Museum of Catalonia.

THE MAGIC SYMBIOSIS OF ROLAND CABOT
(translated from Spanish)

Without any doubt, what surprises more in the work of this artist is his enthralling search for plastic expressions and the use of multi-field techniques to achieve his painted steel structures, oil painted self-portraits, drawings, etched still-lifes…

Roland Cabot was born in Rio de Janeiro. He studied architecture in Paris from 1953 to 1956.

In 1963 he leaves to the US where he remains 3 years.

In 1967, he settles in Paris.

Let us listen to Roland Cabot in connection with his work: “My work is a permanent dialectic between analysis (reality) and synthesis (creation)”. Incursions in two completely different worlds which express his interior metamorphosis.

As for the evolution of his steel structures he declares: “The geometrical expression initially allured me but, since 1990, I felt it’s limits and freed myself from its constraints with a random language, near to tagging”.

Here also, the author breaks with his formal and aesthetic references. What also surprises is the singular effort which consists in integrating in the same work sculpture, graphics and color, to obtain what we could call a total art.

To summarise, Roland Cabot is an inventive, multi-field artist who realizes with a set of architectural volumes and color a variety of perspectives by mixing these various plastic elements.

By analyzing his sculptural work, we see at first his painted woods, completed between 1966 and 1976, where prevail polychromic elements which make us think of ancestral cultures, with an interlacing of forms, round, conical, cylindrical and baroques, a fusion of primitive languages with a post-industrial aesthetic.

As for his painted steel structures, realized from 1977 to 2006, one sees a more stripped and purer design and an inventive mixture of straight and curved lines which play with the full and the vacuum.

With regard to his Graphic Constructions, carried out from 1960 to 1970, they are a Freudian world, populated with enigmas to be solved, with a surrealistic character and of a particularly interesting expressionism, sometimes worrying, like his oil and etched self-portraits which seem to defy us with an oneiric background which highlights the perfection of the drawing.

Enrique Elorduy, Art Critic
Bilbao, October 2001

THE MODERN SCULPTURE IN FRANCE SINCE 1950
(translated from French)

Roland Cabot poses the problem of the borders of sculpture and the separation of the arts. Is he rather an etcher or a decorator? Or an artist who joins together in his work etching, painting and the decorative arts? It is Roland Cabot himself who proposes the answer: “Considering the symbiosis between volume, graphics and the architectural process which guides my work I use the denomination of Painted Steels for my sculptures.

I am not aware to be a sculptor in the traditional conception”. But precisely, the traditional concept of sculpture has been for a long time exceeded. Currently, the assemblies and the structures which constitute a sculptural space respond to a different concept of sculpture. There is even a tendency to abolish the borders between the arts and to accept their merger in an aesthetic creation.

Roland Cabot is an assembler. His Sculpture-Fountain for the Law Courts in the City of Nancy and his Painted Steels are assemblies of tubes or plates with different orientations which create movements and the opposition of tense fields in space. To apply color to his painted steel structures and panels, Roland Cabot uses original processes which testify his skill and his inventiveness.

Yonel Jianou
« Modern Sculpture in France since 1950 »
Yonel Jianou, Gérard Xuriguera, Aube Lardera.
Arted, Art Editions, 1982

(translated from Portuguese)

We have in the sculpture of Roland Cabot the hegemony of the plans, the eloquence of the rhythms and the total depersonalization of the interpretation limits to which all preceding art referred, an equivalence of the forms foreseen by the spirit, randomly issued from poetic images of a more or less atavistic nature. We see in the exposed works the reaction of the object to the organic model of the body, built according to a futuristic prospect. The large body of architecture proposed to the creator new forms as well as a ludic and transitory behavior.

Before being a sculptor, Roland Cabot was an architect and engraver. His antecedents locate his problematic: the manufacturer who sensitizes the metal plate and who, later on, concentrates on the ambiguous adventure of building his own breathable spaces, by applying the acid and painting on the relentless surface of the scintillating metal.

Let us point out the adventure of “seeing”; the metal plates breathe by an optical process of illusion, proposing a rhythmic system which is not exclusively subordinate to a simple cutting or a possible assembly. In fact surfaces are based on the minimal and tyrannical forms of geometry (this answer of man to the universe created) and which,
with an obsessive search, are sensitized according to their own means.

By engraving the drawing and recreating textures which the shade and the fold live with a particular magic, Cabot allows the development of a diagram whose end is the exhaustion of its own desire, returning to the eventual romanticism of unforeseen dimensions of reality.

With his recent monumental Sculpture Fountain, carried out for the new Law Courts of the town of Nancy in France, he introduces textures specific to water, counterpoint of the industrialized tubes which build their own support. The water which runs linear and the contrasting vaporization complete the material and solid matrix forms.

Cabot is, finally, an artist engaged with the external image of the urban world, with the vibrating architecture of the interludes of wars, which proposes to man a possible identity with an evolution, that which Gropius wanted crystal clear, possible symbol of a new faith.

Walmir Ayala, journalist, art critic
Rio, 1980

Local Art – THE VILLAGER, December 3, 1964
ROLAND CABOT OF BRAZIL

The current Showing of Prints and Drawings by Roland Cabot of Brazil, presented at Sudamericana gallery, E. Eighth St., comes to us under the auspices of the Honorable Sra. Dora Vasconcellos, Consul General of Brazil, Armando Zegri, Director of the gallery, told us. It is the first one man Show by this artist. The Metropolitan Museum has purchased the self portrait from the Show; a very fine drawing.

Roland Cabot excels in graphic media. His line is flawless, his greys, blacks, rich. He uses pointillism successfully in many of his finest drawings. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he was sent to France at seventeen to study Architecture at the beaux Arts School of Architecture, later studying etching at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. His work is found in New York Museums of Modern Art and the Metropolitan, and in private collections in France, Brazil and the United States.

None of the prints or drawings are titled. In Number 11, an intricate composition employing many textured fabrics, patterned ones also vie dramatically with baskets, to achieve an amazingly integrated whole. Number 17 and number 19 are magnificently drawn still lifes, of flowers, mugs, vases, small sculpture, while number 14 is a superlative drawing of a girl’s head.

Several lyrical landscapes with female nudes, drawings, highlight this unusually fine exhibition. In direct contrast there is a satirical “masque” which intrigues the imagination. Here is a draughtsman who is essentially accurate, who uses draped fabrics accented with geometrics; triangles, spheres, cylinders, to achieve a pattern which from across the room assumes a kind of a Picasso-like face, but which is strictly CABOT. In short, this young artist has his own powerfully expressed idiom. Our congratulations to him.

Mabel Macdonald Carver

NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, November 28, 1964

Roland Cabot (Sudamericana, 10 E. 8th): This young Brazilian well deserves his first one-man show of prints and drawings. In one landscape with nude he utilizes a pointillist effect that gives the print classic uniformity. In his abstract still-lifes, pattern contains the composition.

John Gruen

NEW YORK JOURNAL AMERICAN, November 14, 1964

Figurative and abstract etchings and drawings by Roland Cabot of Brazil stand out with rich, darkish texture at Sudamericana, 10 E. 8th st. An almost-pointilist grain effect enhances the decorative quality of landscapes with nudes.

L. E. Levick

ART NEWS, November 1964

Roland Cabot (Sudamericana, Nov. 10-25): of Brazil shows intelligent graphics that make use of patterning, graining and texturing as functional elements in a chiaroscuro, and less interesting still-lifes which tend to be linear compositions, with decoration added.