Francesco Igory Deiana: CRAZY ANGEL

by Christopher Hart Chambers

Francesco Igory Deiana installation view
Francesco Igory Deiana installation view
Installation view from left:  Francesco Igory Deiana Untitled, 2023, acrylic, one shot enamel, latex paint on wood, 137 x 244cm, 54" x 96", unique and, Untitled, 2023, acrylic, one shot enamel, latex paint on wood, 137 x 122cm, 54" x 48", unique
Installation view from left: Francesco Igory Deiana, Untitled, 2023, acrylic, one shot enamel, latex paint on wood, 137 x 244cm, 54″ x 96″, unique. Right: Untitled, 2023, acrylic, one shot enamel, latex paint on wood, 137 x 122cm, 54″ x 48″, unique

Francesco  Igory Deiana’s  exhibition comprises three different mediums and several entirely disparate approaches to art making: drawings, paintings, and sculptures. The salient unifying feature is that all of the work is exquisitely well crafted. The paintings, which make up the bulk of the show, are rendered in latex and acrylic in solid bright colors, for hard edged abstractions with strong, simple graphics. Ribbons of color, some shiny, some matte, wriggle down and across the surfaces. There are emblematic wings that might be borrowed from a Bavarian crest and stylistic serifs flare off in the otherwise essentially symmetrical compositions. In the back area of the gallery one larger and one smaller painting face each other. These two portray folding screens adorned with various abstracted motifs.

Francesco Igory Deiana installation view
Francesco Igory Deiana installation view

The monochromatic graphite drawings are backed with smudgy cloud formations like shimmering or dappled light. Atop this parallel vertical straight lines run about an eighth of an inch apart, like piano strings, twinkling in and out of the gloaming hypnotically. They are poster sized vertical rectangles; hung in a grid four across and two high. The imagery is cut off midway in a crescent so that the way they are displayed one has to either bend down or be very tall to look at either row straight on which forces the viewer to experience them peripherally and swoon a bit with the illusionistic Op Art effect.

There are fewer sculptures: a couple of globes resembling balls of wool and a cast, pigmented resin human head. It is not clear what ties these pieces in thematically with the rest, but in its gestalt the display is entirely appealing and sensually gratifying.

Francesco Igory Deiana, Dream Light, 2022, foam, resin, acrylic, lamp, 33 x 14 x 14 cm, 13 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 in unique FD/S 9
Francesco Igory Deiana, Dream Light, 2022, foam, resin, acrylic, lamp, 33 x 14 x 14 cm, 13 x 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 in unique FD/S 9

Francesco Igory Deiana: CRAZY ANGEL at Ruttkowski;68, New York City from April 7, 2023 to May 13, 2023

The Counter/Self : Art Museum at the University of Toronto

by Emese Krunák-Hajagos

The Counter/Self, the title of this exhibition, immediately captured my attention. I have always been interested in the hidden characters of people, including myself. We all have many faces and various personalities in addition to the one we consider our true self. It brings to mind Janus with his two faces in mythology and all the people through historical and contemporary times who often changed their personalities. As I have experienced myself, it can happen when we’re under social pressure, relocating, or trying to succeed in a society that has a different culture than the one we’re used to. Every self is performative and we also summon different characters to avoid conflict with others or to please them, as needed. Each of us express or hide our various sides of ourselves. Both social and personal identities are created by inner drives and external expectations that mirror our dreams and fears. There are also the masks we choose to put on intentionally to transfer us into another world or character. So, I thought this exhibition would offer endless possibilities in addressing this complex and exiting theme.

Installation view of THE COUNTER/SELF, Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
Installation view of THE COUNTER/SELF, Art Museum at the University of Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Courtesy of the Art Museum at the University of Toronto

In this exhibition at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in its Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Indigenous and diasporic Canadian artists analyze both national and personal identities by creating imaginative alter-egos with challenging narratives.

The first image we encounter is Meryl McMaster’s My Destiny is Entwined With Yours from the series As Immense as the Sky (2019), depicting a woman wearing shaman-like clothes in a grandiose landscape. Coming from a nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and British/Dutch background, ancestral history is very important to McMaster and is the central theme of her photography. Each image is a contemplation on how one’s identity is formed. She traveled across Canada to site specific locations and research in order to re-experience ancestral stories learned from Elders, Knowledge Keepers within her Plains Cree community, family members, and friends. All of the images have a story to them, documenting the artist’s relationship with the natural world and the history written in the landscape. She admires the beauty of the land, listens to its wisdom but also fears for its future. In her explorations of the self, McMaster’s photographs reimagine many of the stories and traces left behind by different cultures.

Meryl McMaster, My Destiny is Entwined With Yours, from the series As Immense as the Sky, 2019, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain.
Meryl McMaster, My Destiny is Entwined With Yours, from the series As Immense as the Sky, 2019, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

She often talks about the collapse of time into the present, while we often feel being outside of time when looking at her artwork. Her concept of time comes from two overlapping ideas. One is that time is a linear path that extends from the present in all directions, while the other one is recurrent and cyclical.

In the series As Immerse as the Sky, McMaster focuses on how the experience of time shapes the self’s connection to the immediate world. She creates dream-like images aiming to break down the barriers of time and space, picturing realities of collective history and the present, in new ways. Her image-making procedure starts with assuming a persona with a character and then playing out the story. All images are private performances, the artist’s responses to memory and to emotion. Landscape plays an important role as a dominant element in the composition as well as in creating the mood. The artist believes that the land holds more knowledge and power than we are able to see. Her pieces feel real as well as magical. Otherworldly figures populate the landscapes wearing mysterious sculptural attires. The created image is mythical and mystical at the same time. What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth II (2019) is staged in a winter landscape where everything is covered by blindingly white snow, that is heavy, almost like stone. The sky is blue — one of McMasters favorite colors — and beautiful. The artist stands in a meditative pose, wearing a white garment and veils. Over her dress there are numerous red creatures that look like dragonflies and ants. Red is a powerful color and for McMaster it represents her ancestry and her responsibility to pass down the knowledge of the elders to the next generation. From where and how did these creatures get here? What do they represent? Are they bringing life into this frozen world or invading it? Putting it in some kind of danger? There are no answers for these questions from the artist as she seems to play a passive role. It seems like, as she said earlier, we have entered another dimension of time, where any kind of balance is possible.

Meryl McMaster, What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth II, 2019, digital C-prints. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette Contemporary Art.
Meryl McMaster, What Will I Say to the Sky and the Earth II, 2019, digital C-prints. Courtesy of the artist, Stephen Bulger Gallery, and Pierre-François Ouellette Contemporary Art

Like McMaster, Adrian Stimson is also searching for his identity in his work. He is a member of the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in southern Alberta, Canada, and an interdisciplinary artist who exhibits internationally. His performance art examines identity, pinpointing how a strange mixture of the characteristics of the Indian, the cowboy and the shaman has been created and idealized. Buffalo Boy and The Shaman Exterminator are recurring personas in his mythology. In the Buffalo Boy performances, the artist fashioned his alter-ego Buffalo Boy (a play on the name Buffalo Bill) into someone totally different, in opposition to the colonial image of a ‘real’ Indian with feathers and buckskin, hunting buffaloes with spears. Stimson wants to change this stereotype and reprogram the Indian image. New Born Buffalo Boy (2022) is a product of his reprogramming of the idea of the Indian, making it more open, and more contemporary with homoeroticism depicted with a great sense of humor. Stimson stands in poses of pride, wearing a strange mixture of traditional and modern outfits. In his images his face is painted with black paint around the chin mimicking Indian tattoos, his lips are red and he wears heavy blue make up around his eyes – giving him a woman’s provocative appearance. He wears a braided wig under a cowboy hat, a leather shirt and buffalo hide leg coverings as well as sexy stockings. In Buffalo Boy, Stimson creates a new person with mixed sexuality that contradicts both the traditional Indigenous and the colonial ideals, opening doors to a new reality where he is free to construct his own identity.

Adrian Stimson, New Born Buffalo Boy, 2022, performance still. Courtesy of the artist
Adrian Stimson, New Born Buffalo Boy, 2022, performance still. Courtesy of the artist

Julius Poncelet Manapul also addresses sexual identity issues in his triptych, Whitewashed Bakla in the Presence of the Rice Queen (2017). The artwork, especially the two male figures on the sides, brings to mind Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, with its crowded composition, the use of masks and decorative ornamentation. The male figures’ outfits combine Indigenous Ifugao, Igorot and Ilocano attire designed from paper templates of butterflies, often used in the Philippines. Their faces are half covered by Asian masks. The Rice Queen in the middle reminds me of renaissance portraits of queens as well as sculptures of the Virgin Mary dressed for a religious procession, carried by singing believers. All the figures are paper cut-outs, framed by butterfly motifs combined with skin whitening products and gay porn elements. The references to Spanish culture are strong as the artist comes from a Filipino background, where the Spanish influence and domination is still present. Manapul’s works show the artist’s opposition to colonialism, European hegemony and sexual normativity.

Julius Poncelet Manapul, Whitewashed Bakla in the Presence of the Rice Queen, triptych, 2017, digital collage print. Courtesy of the artist.
Julius Poncelet Manapul, Whitewashed Bakla in the Presence of the Rice Queen, triptych, 2017, digital collage print. Courtesy of the artist

Stacey Tyrell examines power, heritage and racial issues in post-colonial societies and the Caribbean diaspora. Mistress and Slave is a complex composition with personal and historical references. In this provocative image, Tyrell impersonates two historical women, Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her second cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, who lived in 18th century England. Dido Belle was a mixed-race daughter of a British aristocrat, Sir John Lindsay, and an enslaved African woman in the West Indies, Maria Belle. Dido Belle grew up with her Murray cousins in England. Sounds like a happy ending. The pictured Lady Elizabeth and Dido Belle tells a somewhat different story, not that nice. The two young women stand side by side without looking at each other. There is no connection between them as they represent two different worlds. Lady Elizabeth is white and her appearance is an accurate depiction of British society norms at that time. She wears an intricate, rice-powdered wig with a boat, pearls and, more importantly, holds the keys of the household, symbolizing her power over everything and everyone in it. In strong contrast Dido Belle is a black person and appears in a simple white dress with a colored turban on her head. She seems more pure and much more natural than Lady Elizabeth. She holds half a papaya in her hands, a reference to her origins, that also reminds us of female genitalia. It is hard to guess her position in the household. Tyrell beautifully addresses racial issues and her dual (Canadian and Caribbean) ancestry in this artwork.

Stacey Tyrell, Mistress and Slave, 2018, from Untitled series. Courtesy of the artist © Stacey Tyrell
Stacey Tyrell, Mistress and Slave, 2018, from Untitled series. Courtesy of the artist © Stacey Tyrell

Like in Tyrell’s work, power is a central element in White Liar and the Known Shore: Frobisher and the Queen (2021). This monumental and theatrical composition, is a collaborative artwork created by Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory (Inuk) and Jamie Griffith (Canada, UK), two multidisciplinary artists based in Iqaluit, Nunavut. In an almost unrealistic landscape, depicted in the winter in Nunavut, when the water is frozen and the mountains are covered by snow, two figures appear. Griffith adopts the persona of the English explorer Sir Martin Frobisher. He is the White Liar, wearing the white clothes of the Elizabethan era, holding a gun in his hand to symbolize his power and cruelty. He is standing with his back to us. Williamson Bathory impersonates Queen Elizabeth I with her famous white make-up that also refers to whitened bones, an Inuit symbol for respects to ancestors. Her dress somewhat mimics Elizabeth’s style, especially the collar but the red color could be associated with blood. She holds a red and black flag that originated in the Greenlandic mask dance. She is turned in the opposite direction from Frobisher. Her facial expression shows anger and fear, screaming into the distance. The entire composition gives me an uneasy feeling. The two figures are not related in any way. The color code is also worrisome, with the whiteness of the land and Frobisher’s clothes juxtaposed against the dominant red of the Queen. We can’t see Frobisher’s face as he looks at the empty, rigid land. There is no welcome from the land or the people. It is an isolated place with people who wanted to left alone. What does he want from this land? In reality, what he got was fool’s gold, a useless rock that the British mistook for real. Fortune seeking went wrong here but colonialization remained, causing the Indigenous people suffering in their own land historically and into the present.

Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory & Jamie Griffiths, White Liar and the Known Shore: Frobisher and the Queen, 2021, photography on stretched canvas. Courtesy of the artists.
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory & Jamie Griffiths, White Liar and the Known Shore: Frobisher and the Queen, 2021, photography on stretched canvas. Courtesy of the artists

The Counter/Self delivers a strong political message through very rich visuals. Communal histories depicted through the artists’ personal experiences create a dialogue about cultural legacies and social expectations, bringing up questions about our national narratives and power structures. The artists’ stories, being tragic or enigmatic — even flamboyant or whimsical — turn our attention to important, harmful and mostly unsolved issues about racism, colonialism and sexual orientation. It is an exhibition you need to visit more than once to fully understand its message.

The Counter/Self: Group Exhibition, curated by Mona Filip, January 11 – March 25, 2023, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto. Museum hours: Tue, Thurs, Fri, Sat 12 – 5 pm, Wed 12 – 8 pm.

Alvin Roy: Remembering the Present, Embracing the Past

by Jonathan Goodman

Talking Heads #11/ The In Crowd © Alvin Roy 2019 30 x 24 x 1 inch (h x w x d) Mixed media and collage on paper on canvas
Talking Heads #11/ The In Crowd © Alvin Roy 2019 30 x 24 x 1 inch (h x w x d) Mixed media and collage on paper on canvas

Alvin Roy, a painter of considerable gifts, was born and raised in Houston during the Civil Rights era. He studied first at the Houston Technical Institute, then moved to New York City to further his studies at Pratt Institute. Toward the end of the Vietnam War, he enlisted in the Marines. This decision provided him with the chance to travel and experience other cultures. In Okinawa, Roy studied watercolor techniques with a local master, also internalizing the recognition that the spiritual life of an object is as important as the formal attributes it consists of. Roy has remained in Houston for more than forty years now, using mixed-media assemblage to create bas-relief wall pieces. Jazz, an important influence, occurs in his work in the form of saxophones, keyboards, and colorful patterns that reflect the texture of the music. Roy also turns to Egyptian culture, imaging pharaohs and, also, figures of ancient spiritual archetypes. Most recently, Roy has resorted to mixed-media techniques and collage on paper to explore the quilting tradition in the southern United States and to address the history of the Underground Railroad.

isis and osiris small © alvin roy 2008.

Roy’s formidable energy is evident from the start. His work, at first glance, looks entirely abstract, but the reliefs are more truly described as a mixture of abstract and figurative influences. His recent series, “Talking Heads,” regularly includes white vertical bars, decorated randomly, that divide the large painterly field occurring behind them. Color is important in its own right, but oneiric forms are also found. Eyes, noses, mouths, and, every so often, a full figure can be found in these complex assemblages of abstract shapes, often pieced together as one would find in a quilt. Roy’s colors also are unusually strong; they are dense, often dark, and luminous, as if rising from the night in a dream. His talents are such that he has found a way of connecting with history and culture more by implication rather than by direct illustration. His multi-cultural approach, evident in the combination of forms, materials, and allusions, make him a national artist of note—even when his inspiration is deeply personal.

Blue Aphrodite © Alvin Roy 2008
Blue Aphrodite © Alvin Roy 2008

Perhaps the most accomplished element in Roy’s work is his ability to create intricate genres: partly non objective, partly figurative; both sculptural and representational; and measured and free. In many ways, this is the manner in which an innovative exploratory artist works—by merging genres, images, and materials. In Roy’s case, such combinations are made stronger by the framework of history, as well as references to the ancient art of Egypt. We are living in a time of unusual eclecticism, and Roy’s composite efforts make wonderful use of the old and the new. Certainly, the work’s overall impression tends to be one of colorful abstraction, but recognizable figurative elements, sometimes partially hidden by the overall pattern of the paint, also make their way into Roy’s art. One instinctively feels that his historical references structure and deepen the paintings’ ability to communicate. It is not easy to find such a successful mix of histories, and patterns informed by those stories, in works that convey a visionary point of view. Alvin Roy’s work can be viewed in a virtual gallery at:

https://bit.ly/ccapalroyex

Saul Acevedo Gomez’s Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature

by Anne Leith

Saul Avecido Gomez, Installation View
Installation View

Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature, is the title of Saul Acevedo Gomez’s recent installation at Swivel Saugerties. The title references Magritte’s painting ‘Forethought’, depicting a tree branching out with a curious group of diverse flower varieties, and like Magritte, Gomez’s work is a layered puzzle of ideas and images, including what Magritte called ‘language games’. Gomez’s subject matter is nature, but not depicted in a naturalistic way – he creates drawings of rooms with artwork and text, such as canvases leaning face towards the walls, childlike depictions of trees and flowers on strips of paper, personal notes, references to other artists and writers, and cryptic commentary. These drawings reflect on how we are failing in our attempts to keep the planet healthy – and to the anxiety that provokes – perhaps due to a lack of forethought?

Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature was situated in a small bank vault room, ‘The Safe’. The installation included tiled floors that match those in the drawings, which enhanced the effect of entering into a claustrophobic diorama of ideas. The enclosed space of The Safe, with its echo chamber of sound was the perfect setting for creating a deliberate sense of unease, with the implication that ‘nature’ is now a precious commodity that is locked away in a man-made vault for safe keeping.

Saul Avecido Gomez, Don't Worry We Got Art
Don’t Worry We Got Art, 2022, colored pencil on paper, 26″ x !9″

Each drawing is an exploration of ideas, deliberately hidden and ambiguous, with canvases leaning against the walls, the front side unseen. The interiors walls of these ‘rooms’ are layered with repeated childlike drawings of trees and flowers and hand-drawn wood grain, creating an attractive decorative space then subverted by scrawled dystopic messages. Text and titles such as Don’t Worry We Got Art, How To Be At Peace With Nature, and Sit and Meditate The Fire Is Coming pointedly undermines any sense of comfort or simple pleasure in the images. One example is Find Me If You Are Feeling Anxious, which includes a drawn computer link to search for How To Enjoy this Moment and the back of a canvas roughly drawn with the text I Hope You Start Panicking Today.

Saul Avecido Gomez, It's Time to Let Go
It’s Time to Let Go, 2022, colored pencil on paper, 26″ x 19″

Gomez creates a matrix of illusion in these poetic works, connecting art, nature, and the internet – complex yet refreshingly clear with well-thought-out ideas. His drawn link motif to internet searches such as How Can I Experience Nature emphasizes the non-experiential way we interact today with the nature around us – as do the canvases leaning against the wall – another level of separation from truly seeing what is going on.

This intriguing show is layered with meaning, and handsomely offers up a troubling look at one artist’s view of the state of man/nature/art and the ideas surrounding their interface today.

Saul Acevedo Gomez: Forethought: Last Paintings of Nature, Swivel Saugerties, Safe Room Project, 258 Main Street, Saugerties, NY 12477 November 12 – December 11, 2022

Auto Interview with John Mendelsohn: The Dark Color Wheel Paintings

On the occasion of his exhibition, Dark Color Wheel Paintings at the David Richard Gallery in New York, John Mendelsohn asks and answers his own questions about his work. The twelve paintings in the series were made in 2022.

Why an interview in this form?
Autofiction, Autoeroticism, Auto Interview!

How did you do these paintings?
To misquote the sportswriter Red Smith, “There’s nothing to it. All I do is starting working and open a vein.”

I mean your technique – do you use mechanical devices for making the circles and projecting rays?
No mechanical devices, no taping, everything by hand. Just the radical act of painting on canvas.

Why the title Dark Color Wheel paintings?
They follow my Color Wheel series that were exhibited at the David Richard Gallery in 2021. Like the earlier series, they have discs with color projecting from their centers. The form suggests a color wheel, a device that shows color relationships.

Dark Color Wheel 5, 2022, 40 x 27 in, acrylic on canvas
Dark Color Wheel 5, 2022, 40″ x 27″, acrylic on canvas

In contrast to the earlier series, the new paintings have a wider range of colors, deeper tonalities, and lower saturation hues that play off against exuberant, purer hues. Sequences of primary colors contrast with unexpected juxtapositions, that devolve into tinted grays and blacks. For me, color in these paintings is lyrical, astringent, and ultimately mysterious.

What was the origin of these paintings?
Success has many mothers. To quote myself, speaking about the impetus for these paintings, “The first was a dream I has as a child, a wonderful dream, in which I entered a golden chamber with turning golden wheels, like a clockwork’s interior. Second, there was a visit to the hospital to visit a friend who was at the end of his life. He said to us that he saw spinning discs, but that only he could see them, not us. Third, while conducting an art workshop at a senior center, I was teaching a participant how to paint flowers with dark centers.”

Dark Color Wheel 2, 2022, 40" x 27", acrylic on canvas
Dark Color Wheel 2, 2022, 40″ x 27″, acrylic on canvas

How about your feelings at the start of this series of paintings?
A poetic motive for the paintings was the phrase “a song of flowering and fading”, conjured up by the paintings’ radiating forms, that suggested a way to consider the splendor and shadow pervading everything.

Can you say something about how these paintings developed within the series?
The paintings began with richly colored works that are quite dark in tonality. The chromatics start to change, with some really surprising and at times disturbing sequences of hues. There are then a number of softly atmospheric paintings. They give way to the final group of works, with strong contrasts of tinted blacks and a cold, blazing light.

These paintings have a particular mood. Do you agree?
I would say a spectrum of moods. The persistence of light against encroaching darkness constitutes one of the central motifs in these works. It helps to evoke these paintings’ moods: an unstable mixture of melancholy and brightness – a sense of inevitable waning consorting with beauty that is a fugitive, saving grace.

The discs and rays suggest many associations beyond color wheels: flower forms, the movement of time, the wheel of life, the piercing appearance of the miraculous in the everyday.

Dark Color Wheel 10, 2022, 40" x27", acrylic on canvas
Dark Color Wheel 10, 2022, 40″ x27″, acrylic on canvas

What about the style of these paintings – how would you describe it.
I wouldn’t. I would say that in the context of these abstract works, illusionistic possibilities had arisen, unbidden. These include a painterly, representational quality, a sense of space, and the impression of emanating and reflective light. As is my practice, I allow rather than censor.

Do you recognize precedents for this work?
Of course. I’ll let the art historians have a crack at this, but … “No Caravaggio, no Delaunays, no Stella – no Dark Color Wheel paintings.”

I notice that from series to series your paintings really change – why?
At one point in the past, I would say that I was restless. At another point, I would say, there is no need to choose one approach. Now I am inclined to say that I’m guided to the next thing, which can be more closely or more distantly related. After doing this for quite a while now, some patterns of thought emerge, but so do more mysteries.

Dark Color Wheel 11, 2022, 40" x 27", acrylic on canvas
Dark Color Wheel 11, 2022, 40″ x 27″, acrylic on canvas

What do you think that these paintings can give a viewer?
Their je ne sais quoi – literally, “I do not know what”, says it all. That is, paintings can have an ineffable quality; it enables distinctive experiences – entrancing, unsettling, moving.

What do you think about what people have written about your work?
Let them knock themselves out. Among the comments: formalist, whimsical, strategic, romantic, failed minimalist — the last I especially appreciated. Since I occasionally write about art, I know that it is fairly impossible.

Dark Color Wheel 12, 2022, 40" x 27", acrylic on canvas
Dark Color Wheel 12, 2022, 40″ x 27″, acrylic on canvas