A glazed rebellion: Scott Garceau’s hole-hearted art at The Crucible Gallery
It’s going to be a quiet riot. Think of distressed American flags, tattered and oozing with blood, bulleted by skulls, dollar signs, upside-down crosses and sad emojis in lieu of white stars. That’s Scott Garceau’s idea for his next painting project in reaction to last year’s American presidential elections. But for now, he’s serving donuts: massive, pink-frosted, sometimes-sprinkled sugar bombs that hover, loom and flatten everything around them. The backdrop, in this case, are some of the most iconic rock ‘n’ roll records ever released.
The monolith that the guys from The Who relieved themselves upon on the “Who’s Next” album has been replaced with… a donut. The pulsar pulses from Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” form… a donut. The oiled, ultra-limber, goddess-like Grace Jones in “Island Life” contorts in front of… a donut. Well, you get the picture.
Was there a specific moment or idea that sparked this series?
Garceau explains, “I know it was during Covid, when we were ordering lots of food. And listening to lots of records. I initially thought of combining album covers with different foods—fruits, strawberries, bananas—and my first idea was the Vargas model on The Cars album reclining on a huge donut. I guess I was also thinking of Magritte with the huge green apple filling up the room. So I just narrowed it to donuts because they were big and round.”
Big and round like those vinyl long-playing records: rubber rings that make us smile/cry and have saved a lot of lives (cue The Smiths’ track from the “Louder Than Bombs” record).
The artist wanted the donut to “co-exist” with the composition, but also be kind of looming in the background. “Like an insistent thought,” he insists. He goes on to say that part of choosing the donut was its versatile nature. “The sprinkles, colors, etc. Like with surrealism, it’s not what is expected. There’s maybe a subversive, vaguely sexual element that goes with combining rock imagery/danger with something childish, seemingly innocuous.”
What emerges in his exhibition titled “Donut Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (currently on view at The Crucible Gallery in SM Megamall) is a strangely reverent pastiche: the reverberating echoes of classic rock (from The Beatles to The Strokes) juxtaposed with the surreal, vaguely obscene, mysteriously out-of-place, sugary curves of a fried pastry.
The donuts do more than decorate; they disrupt. Think intrusive craving meets vinyl fetishism. It’s subversion dressed as a snack and sprinkled with bright acrylic frosting. Fittingly, the gallery served J.Co donuts during the recent opening reception and Scott had a playlist of tracks from the albums that were the jump-off points for his paintings. Been glazed and confused for so long… And, oh, the Hindenburg airship in Led Zeppelin I flies straight into a jelly variant in one of Garceau’s artworks.
“I was looking for interesting combinations, either through using the language of the album cover, or trying to match the aesthetic of the album art. With humor, I guess I tried to avoid direct puns, though not always successfully.” He adds that there’s a fine line between homage and conceptualizing something new. “I’m probably perched somewhere on that line (laughs).”
We ask Scott if the donut is meant to represent something specific—consumer culture, nostalgia, absurdity—or is it more of a formal visual element. And, hey, if it all feels absurd, that’s the point.
“Definitely consumerism, our wants and attractions. Which can be absurd.” The donuts don’t just interrupt the image—they reshape it. “We fetishize all kinds of images now, including food shots… Everything feels up for grabs for mashup.”
The result is an exhibit that walks the line between reminiscence and interference. Scott amplifies, “Yes, it leans more towards nostalgia and disruption, but without leading to or drawing any conclusions about interpretation.” In other words, Garceau doesn’t tell you what to think—he just gives you something impossible to ignore. Like a donut the size of your memories.
Similar to the aforementioned apple in Magritte’s opus or maybe that black, rectangular slab in Stanley Kubrick’s space movie. In this case, the donuts that intervene upon rock n’ roll’s most iconic compositions are enigmatic (just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Led Zeppelin’s “Presence”) and, at the same time, yummy (just like the choco caviar donut handed to me by Therese Garceau—writer, flamenco dancer, keyboardist, drummer, and Scott’s better half).
But why was there no painting of a Pink Floyd record? A donut refracting a white beam into a spectrum of sprinkles, perhaps. Or two businessmen shaking hands with one of them on fire and the other one under a monolithic Avocado DiCaprio.
“I guess I admire the aesthetic of Hipgnosis so much, I didn’t think I could successfully overrule it with a huge donut.”
The real trick Scott Garceau pulls off isn’t just visual—it’s existential. His donuts haunt like ghosts of meriendas past, floating in our heads like the baby in “Nevermind” in a pool of custard. You’re not just looking at rock history; you’re watching it get sugar-bombed, meme-ified and lovingly vandalized. It is Björk haloed by a donut gazing into the abyss as the abyss glazes back at her.
And somehow, it makes total sense.
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Scott Garceau’s “Donut Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” is on view until May 11 at The Crucible Gallery, SM Megamall A, Mandaluyong City.
