Steve Roden: Cups into clouds, songs into rain, and other landscapes

Exactly two years after his first exhibition at e/static (a period of very intense work, rewarded with the acquisition of the large installation Moon Field by the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Arts), Steve Roden returns to Turin with some new works confirming his versatility and freshness, and the qualitative and quantitative richness of his repertory.
Drawings, paintings, sculptures, a sound installation: diverse parts that center around the idea, fundamental to his work, of translation (cups into clouds, songs into rain...).The most emblematic of all is Vowels, presented here in a brand new version, created expressly for this exhibition, in which the sung sounds of the five vowels pass through a computer graphic visualization, and are transformed into the same number of sculptures, each colored according to the associations formulated by Arthur Rimbaud in his famous poem, Voyelles.
Roden's is a procedure that achieves results of great freedom and lightness, always moving from a very precise and rigorous preventive codification, according to modalities that, as well as having a certain analogy with the rules of biological growth, call to mind, above all, John Cage.
In fact, these are applied with the intention of containing the determinative activity of the ego, thus leaving the door open to the unforeseeable and uncontrollable. A sort of ‘pure’ creation, in a natural sense - that is, undecided - thanks to which the work blossoms from the hands of the creator, who, therefore deliberately, limits himself to function as an element of the creative process, offering the user himself the possibility of partaking in the process.
This last is a necessary condition in order that the true nature of the work can truly reveal itself, and bloom yet again.