24 Feb Romen Gouveia, ‘Guilty pleasure … the impossibility of logic’ by Emer Costello
Posted by Alicia on Saturday, June 16, 2012 · 23 Comments
Romen Gouveia’s installation, ‘Guilty pleasure … the impossibility of logic’, an electric boutique of colour, charges the debate of how “brands play the roles of deities in our culture, creating our most powerful iconography, building our most utopian monuments, articulating our experience back at us, not religion, not intellectuals, not poets”. (Klein, p.30, 2002) Showcasing at ‘Goldsmiths Degree Show, 2012’ his kaleidoscopic piece creates an experience which makes the case for the dominant force of the luxury label and the increasingly oblique line which separates the market structures of the designer commodity and the fine art industries.
The crux of the work centres on his signature prints which, act like emblems for the changing patterns of our present financial systems. He creates fractal images in a unique un-doctored photographic process using mirrors. A structural engineering of space, the patterns stretch before us to the unknown end point, psychedelic formations like the Russian roulette of our progressively globalised society.
As if a metaphor for the extravagance, excess and pleasure we receive from consumption –debatably the flaw of human nature that has caused our present fiscal condition, his prints on Perspex, fine and heavy silk are packaged into independent commodities which can be bought and conversely who’s origins derive from the looking glass turned in upon itself.
It is this unlikely marriage and Romen’s ability to lure in his audience, that his strength lies. I find myself wanting to spin under the pina colada parapluie of his images, to be seduced by the karma sutra of his colour wheel. However presented in the space of the gallery, the sumptuous fruits of this consumer hacienda makes one acutely aware of our appetite for indulgence. His designs in bilateral symmetry like a haute Rorschach inkblot psychological test, both alluring and a cognitive analysis of our desire.
Romen Gouveia, ‘Guilty pleasure… the impossibility of logic’, Studio B, Goldsmiths Degree Show 2012, Private View, 14 June 6 – 9pm/ 15th – 18th June 10am – 7pm/except Sunday 17th June
Emer Costello
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