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Jan.2, 2005 - Jan.9, 2005 |
The Abstract Form
Italo-Canadians display works at Joseph D. Carrier Gallery
By Jennifer Febbraro
Originally Published: 2004-02-15
Abstract art never really left Toronto," explained Flavio Belli, well-seasoned curator of the Joseph D. Carrier Gallery. "It just took an even deeper turn towards the conceptual."
Describing the Toronto art scene is a Gordian knot for any critic, but it's my belief that any art arena is in good health so long as abstraction is given its due nod of approval. Belli frames this exhibition of the second in a series, the first being the Go Figure exhibition which featured works on, explicitly, the body. This show, he notes, "is historically based and there are a lot of references to other periods of painting, especially Miro and Matisse's cutouts."
This month's show, Abstractions showcases emerging and mid-career artists of Italian descent waxing conceptual onto the canvas, specifically: Nick Biagini, Silvana Bruni, Julie Garibotti, Tom Grella, Mascia Manunza, Robert Marra, Anthony Mazzone, Richard Mongiat, Lisa Petrocco, and Diego Spinelli.
Mongiat, an artist in the show whose paintings are small-format, borderline cartoonish, makes loose references to machinery, and comments that the artists in this show "have chosen to work within a genre once considered heroic and now are viewed by some as suspicious."
Diego Spinelli describes his heavily textured (hole-ridden) surfaces as emerging from "a series of thoughts, emotions, and different states of mind." While this could be an artist statement for any art show known to have ever existed, its generality speaks of something mystically latent in the abstract intention.
Abstract painters usually speak less of content or reference, and more (naturally) of colour and feel. Lisa Petrocco's original microscopic investigations which project the small into large-scale canvases works with a kind of stucco. The viewer is found staring into translucent globular swirls and jabs woven above and between colour, texture its second language. Her sense of colour, Belli explains, "definitely has a retro feel, stylistically she plays with colours from the 50s and 60s."
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