It is difficult, at first, to even find Sue de Beer’s video “Permanent Revolution.” A big white box—a minimal cube—sits obliquely in the center of Sandroni.Rey’s exhibition space; graceless spotlights fitted with green lenses project light onto three of the cube’s sides; a slim, elevated opening serves as the sole indication that the box is inhabitable. Stepping cautiously into blackness, one reaches the projection room within, furnished with a shaggy carpet and a few slouchy, low lying couches. The sculptural, architectural, tactile drama of this whole sequence – itself a viable theatrical narrative—ends up compromising the centrality of the video itself.

But that seems to the point. de Beer’s videos never aspire towards a sense of cohesion, narrative heft, or character-driven intrigue. They are an offering of mostly unsmoothed images and ideas, brought together dissonantly in a visual-intellectual montage. Here is a whole panoply of cinematic captures: Straightforward recitations of texts by Walter Gropius et al, then moody pans evocative of so many high school film projects, then a good, pure spectacle (one man in an outsized, grotesque mask and a cape set afire by another, inexplicably). To mine these difficult and achingly cool images for a stable set of meanings seems futile—where to nest one’s conclusions, in de Beer’s fondness for architectural theory or in those instances of absurdist pyrotechnics? What gives the exhibition depth—and novelty—is the strange journey towards the screen.

- Nico Machida

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Sue de Beer, Permanent Revolution, October 20 - December 20, 2007; Sandroni Rey, Permanent Revolution video still, 2007, Courtesy of the Artist and Sandroni Rey.  Sue de Beer, Permanent Revolution, October 20 - December 20, 2007; Sandroni Rey, Permanent Revolution video still, 2007, Courtesy of the Artist and Sandroni Rey.  Sue de Beer, Permanent Revolution, October 20 - December 20, 2007; Sandroni Rey, Permanent Revolution video still, 2007, Courtesy of the Artist and Sandroni Rey.)