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For Luke Roberts, The Veto of Reason effects an exorcism of all held dear in love and hate. Since his return from Amsterdam in the late eighties, a great many walls have come tumbling down for Roberts. But in their wake, heralded by the coming of Goss, do the shards of Humpty Dumpty in the rubble signify the hope of rebirth, even with all the king's horses and all the king's men? The remains of domesticity and culture, which rise in the dust and mud of tar and cement and PVC glue, mimic in their sardonic grimace our pathetic desire for love and alleviation. On ascending the Bellas Gallery stairs, we confront our mirror image in Inseminating the Marvellous. For one brief moment, this cool, clean work, with its accretion of clear glass roses, returns our own banality back to us. Thereafter one admits a Veto of Reason.
For Roberts, all that is sacred and profane does not vanish into air, but rather is objectified as reified mementos in Wunderkammern on canvas. This is the terrain of the collector and the raconteur extraordinaire, of pagan rites and reliquaries. And was it all done with mirrors in a ritual presided over by the legendary, yet long absent, Pope Alice?
The literalness of this cacophony of kitsch returns the literalness of Duchamp and Surrealist forbears, with reverie subsumed in the suspension of the object as fetish as it aspires to forget its nightmare. That is the purpose of exorcism. The resplendence of coagulated 'junk', as interred by Roberts, ruptures the near sublimity of Inseminating the Marvellous, its offspring now profoundly of the earth. Indeed the earth of Australia's desert heartland (soil