SAINT CLAIR CEMIN:  Sculptor from Cruz Alta (monograph)
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition hardback:  October 2005.
Designed by Richard Milazzo.
528 pages, with a 4-colour gatefold jacket, a black and white photograph of the artiston the frontispiece by Paolo Roversi, 154 color and 500 black and white reproductions.
13.25 x 9.75 x 1.75 in., printed, sewn, and bound in Belgrade, Serbia.
ISBN:  1-893207-25-0.
New York:  Brent Sikkema Editions, 2005.

RETAIL PRICE: $90.00 (includes postage and handling)

About the first monograph on this “New York artist from Brazil,” Saint Clair Cemin:  Sculptor from Cruz Alta, the author writes:  “I have chosen not to apply any theories or to coerce the work into any interpretation.  Instead, I have tried to allow the work to speak for itself, and, where it was possible and appropriate, for the artist to speak in his own behalf, either through his writings or through his interviews with me.”  What we have as a result is a comprehensive study of Cemin’s work that goes straight to the source, to art as the soul, the inspiration, the spirit of man.

The monograph covers Saint Clair Cemin’s early years in Cruz Alta and São Paulo, showing how his roots both in provincial and cosmopolitan Brazilian culture helped to shape his vision as an artist.  It tracks his development as a young artist in Europe, particularly during his Paris years, from 1974 to 1978.  It documents the transitions and turning points in the artist’s career, especially during his life in New York’s Bohemian East Village of the early 1980’s, and goes on to show his coming of age in the New York art world and eventual rise to international prominence in the 1990’s.

As the author proceeds in his analysis of the Cemin’s work and life as a unified phenomenon, he takes into account the early influences on the artist, including his own countryman, the eighteenth-century, Baroque Brazilian sculptor, O Aleijadinho (The Little Cripple), the English poet, William Blake, the Catalan architect, Antonio Gaudì, from Barcelona, the French painter and sculptor, Paul Gauguin, and the quintessential Post-World-War-II German artist, Joseph Beuys.  He shows how Cemin’s break with religion as a young man, his abiding interests in physics, philosophy, and science in general, and his early and rigorous devotion to drawing will all lead to his belief in art as a creative impulse that finds its greatest expression in universe as an extension of mind and in idea as an extension of craft.

Conversant in many languages and a traveler far and wide, Cemin’s feeling for ‘appropriation,’ the author argues, does not interfere with his regard for uniqueness in a work of art.  On the contrary, the artist’s appropriation of cultural motifs and conventions only augments his feeling for material and technique, for originality and vision.  Although Cemin is the consummate hybrid artist, equally at home carving or casting, moving from one style to another, from the Baroque to the Minimal, and in any material, the author devotes whole chapters on his works in bronze, marble, and wood, on his animals, furniture, monuments and fountains, and on the polymorphism (or the relation between the figurative and the abstract) in his works, as well as on specific pieces.

In addition to the intensive analysis of each of the works, beginning from a childhood drawing, Saint Clair Cemin:  Sculptor from Cruz Alta contains approximately 500 black and white illustrations, 155 color plates of the artist’s most seminal works, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, and a complete bibliography.