The works in “Vista View” are grouped around landscape and its abstraction, or alternately abstractions oriented toward terrain and space (as opposed to gesture with its invocation of figure).

This is a very broad theme, and the curatorial process (my first) was in large part aesthetic. At first I wasn’t sure what this might mean, but a friend recommended that we try reading Max Raphael, who had an idea of materialist aesthetics written in the 30’s which did appeal to me. For Raphael, a materialist aesthetics meant not just decoding the ideological myths to which art gives form as the imaginary shared material interest between the ruling class and everyone else; materiality was also just as important as literal art materials, a “means of representation” not necessarily alienated like the means of production and communication, but potentially disalienating by engaging the active viewer in infinite reconstruction. The work of art leads to the process of creation:thiswas his signature inversion. Sense perception in aesthetics was important to Raphael not as an isolated, medium-specific category like opticality, but the opposite, as part of bringing together many faculties, a voluntarism that he explains when writing about Cézanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire: “The artist’s will must intervene because there is an antinomy between the subject’s aspiration to exercise all his faculties and the world of things which had become fragmentary and specialized in Cézanne’s period – the antinomy between the mind that resists its historically determined self-alienation and a world of objects which has already become alienated.”(1) For Raphael, aesthetics spoke of our relationship to the material outside world by crystalizing its own intricate interior logic, not in a “private mythology” but rather “reality enhanced.”