Photograph of the works in Roberto Chabet's Untitled 2005 (Notes on Johannes Vermeer), Magnet Gallery, Paseo, 5 - 26 July 2005.

The work on the left is an installation composed of GI sheets, an open leather trunk filled with mirrors laid on a carpet, facing a neon sign that spells 'Vermeer'. On the right side is a pale blue painting accompanied by a conch shell, which is painted with the same colour.

Other works in the exhibition include four other neon signs - 'The room, The window, The letter, The map' - taken from recurring details in Vermeer's paintings. Beside them is a large painting onto which several small paintings, each with an embedded harmonica, are attached. The large painting is based on a photograph of the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University, where the first experiment on nuclear fission in the US was held in 1939, which Chabet also used as the image for the invitation to the exhibition. The photograph and a text on the experiment conducted by scientist Enrico Fermi, are also included in the installation, attached on two separate clipboards.

Prior to this work, Chabet also completed a trilogy of works which pay homage to Dutch artists. In this work, Chabet deconstructs and reconfigures Vermeer’s world into a tableau that meditates on 'the act of looking and the complex and overlapping processes of interpretation and perception.'

The press release of the exhibition states, Chabet wrote 'the act of looking never fails to posit dilemmas in art such that instead of searching for solutions; it gives birth to whole new movements. The reconfigured objects is a re-enactment of their own history with its own perceived space congealing into a tableau of painting. The installation is an emblem of a world transformed into an image beholden to its maker.'