This 13-by-9-foot oil on canvas painting by Vincent Desiderio, entitled Cockaigne, is a massive work that took years in the creating.  This painting begs the question of whether painting is meant to have any memory.  The composition for this art is extraordinary.  Through a history of reference material for the Western visual arts Desiderio offers up a snapshot of iconic time travel.  He has carved out a place for himself where the Abstract and the Conceptual cross.  Cokaigne is a visual and historical mosaic of books, colors shapes, and sustenance, all frozen randomly in time.

The work was ten years in the making and covered six centuries of Western art.  Although this looks like a the remains of a wild drunken party of librarians who left books scattered all over the floor, it, instead, is a great art history lesson.  Mr. Desiderio painstakingly painted pages of his favorite works by artist from Masaccio, Vermeer and van Eyck to Jasper Johns and Chuck Close.

The art  is inspired by two artists works: Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s “Land of Cockaigne” (1559), and Willem de Kooning’s “Excavation (1950).  In its early stage, Desiderio painted the canvas with a flattened, frenetic array of little squares, creating an abstract inspired by “Excavation”.  As he continued, Mr. Desiderio changed each square into a book appearing to lie on a downward angled plane.  The floor seems to undulate, the images seem to be floating.  This impression is created because the orientation of each book is different.