Books

“It was Baudelaire who perceived in nature “a forest of symbols,” and in his most recent work Rothbart has set us free to wander in just such a forest – a place where artifice and nature, reverie and ritual, meet.”

“Vertical or horizontal, his sculptures all have postures. Some gesture and these allude, obliquely, to the human figure. There are, however, no suggestions of roots. Rothbart’s forms do not seem anchored to the places where they appear; rather, they look as if they have alighted for a moment and are prepared to reappear, immediately or after a long interval, somewhere else. To put it another way: Rothbart makes his sculptures for the world in all its surprising variety, not for the predictability of gallery space. And when they do appear in a gallery, they give its white and elemental geometry an unexpected charge of vitality.”

“Rothbart’s sculpture embodies a surreal poetic drawn from the realm of myth, and his imagery develops out of the historical sedimentation of life experience and scholarship. His fantastic world of myth prompts one to reconsider the sacred as a point of interaction where icons and symbols converge and undergo changes of meaning. Semiotic Street Situations, a term invented by Rothbart, becomes the stage where symbolic, social, and cultural exchanges occur.”

“Rothbart is primarily a visual artist, but his visual encounters can take the form of photographs, of digital collages, of aluminum sculptures, of manuscripts, of research projects, of ceremonies, of videos, of bronze and terracotta artifacts, and of numinous atmospheres – atmospheres which take the sanctified and sensual tonalities of Walter Pater’s La Gioconda and wed them to a mysticism refined by diaspora into minimalist condensations.”

“Surely time, place, and friendships are equally themes. Rothbart’s blend of amateur shindigs, street performers, artists shticks and even landscapes (and camels) is charming and elevating. I suspect a few fallen sparks were set free. Symbols are not just a convenient way of expressing the normally inexpressible. After all, the bowls do not allow just anything to happen; symbols, correctly understood, also create realities”

“Rothbart experiments with many forms and materials, and, in doing so, projects meaning into our consciousness that – as one writer proclaims – ‘forges links to his fellow man.’ As an artist, he has daringly moved his artistic practice against the tide of commodities in search of something profoundly spiritual, a ‘collective memory’ that gives his work eloquence and dignity. Like the sculptor Robert Smithson who placed mirrors in the sacred sites of the Yucatan more than four decades earlier, Daniel Rothbart has chosen to place his aluminum vessels in various sites, both sacred and secular, as a reminder of the universal truths that bind us all and that make each of us indelibly human.”

“Daniel Rothbart envisions and recreates an environment in which he takes part as an actor and also effects instant linkages and connections. In Action Art the relation between any two successive acts embodies the potential of significance, and creates favorable conditions for microcosms to interact with one another. The point of departure is internal and consists of the choice of desire, which is given expression by placing the vessels in a certain place at a certain time. This denotes a kind of cosmogonic constellation that traces relative lines of existence, of motion or lack of motion, of emptiness and fullness.”