>>4241051I watched his video in which he explains his JBP portrait, supposedly in the context of JBP's ideas. He's describing the artistic process as creating order out of chaos, every artistic decision being one that narrows the extent of possibilities and thus eliminating chaos and creating order. While his analysis isn't wrong per se, it funnily enough exposes what his problem is: He seems to think that the desired state is that of perfect order, when even JBP recognized that it is a tightrope walk right on the line between order and chaos that you should aspire. That is how all art should work: You offer the observer something familiar to lead him to somewhere unknown. If it is too much familiarity, the piece won't be interesting enough for people to engage, if is too much of the unknown, the piece will be irritating and meaningless. That is always relative to the observers individual attributes regarding (again staying in JBP's preferred nomenclature) trait openness, of course. As a side note, the exact balance in individual works gives you an idea of the target audience of the artist, which will show you that much of contemporary art is really extremely narrowly tailored to an elite with high levels of openness (mostly artists or academics themselves), which is probably the reason the feeling of alienation that most people experience when confronted with contemporary art.
Much (I wouldn't say all) of Cesars work is very familiar, but kind of fails to step into something new. His JBP portrait is pretty indicative of that: There's no abstraction, nothing to get your brain working, it doesn't confront anything, it is just exactly what you see: The portrait of a man in his mid 50s. That is not the case for all his work, but it's a clear tendency. Despite that, I greatly admire his technical skill.
