Complete & Unabridged 2010

This is Complete & Unabridged by Roberto Chabet, but when it was made, well, I don’t know. The first thing I notice is how that neon light buzzes with possibility. I wonder, did Chabet start with the words or the light? Was it a flash of insight, a feeling he was trying to capture, or did he stumble upon this phrase and think, "Aha! This is it!"? I imagine Chabet, in his studio, maybe late at night, the city quiet, working with these industrial materials. There’s something so immediate about neon, so in-your-face, but the words themselves—"complete & unabridged"—promise the whole story. He asks us, what does it mean to have the whole story? Maybe we can never really grasp a complete picture, but the search, the trying, that's the point. Like painters who came before him, Chabet takes a familiar form and twists it, makes us question it. He nudges us to think about what it means to tell a story, to be complete, and maybe to realize that the most interesting stories are the ones that stay open-ended.