Round & Round

48″ x 24″ x 1.5″
Mixed media: acrylic on birch panel with dimensional elements in wood, wire and clay.

If the landscape works stage the meeting of terrain and diagram, and the urban works stage the compression of sign and structure, the more abstract pieces reveal the core of Côté’s practice: an exploration of how form behaves when it is forced to become spatial. “Round & Round” (2024) unfolds across a wide panel like a dynamic circuit. Large black shapes, arcs and blocks, lock into fields of gray blue, cream, yellow, and red. Circular motifs appear, not as stable centers but as rotational forces, suggesting repetition, recurrence, a kind of visual time. A wire line near the central seam functions like a hinge, a drawn thought that cannot quite settle. In the upper right, a circular form reads simultaneously as a target, a record, a loop. The painting’s logic is not narrative in the literary sense, but it is temporal. It insists that looking is not instantaneous. The viewer’s eye must travel, return, reorient. The title becomes a description of perception itself: round and round, not because the painting is confusing, but because it is structured to produce sustained engagement, to resist the quick consumption that contemporary images solicit.