THE "TRANSITIONAL" SHOW (1983)
The "Waves"
and "Titanic" series had occupied Calzetta for two years and
he seemed to have reached a point where he was unsure of his future direction.
There was a sense of groping in this show at the Mira Godard Gallery in
1983. Some of the paintings tended to look back at earlier work for inspiration.
"Mandarin
Moonlight"
48" x 60" |
© 1982 |
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At some time just before the 1983 show, Calzetta had been working at Dieter
and Deborah Grund's Presswork Editions in Toronto on a print called No
More Henry. This print and two paintings in the transitional show - Greedy Cards and Chinese Tie-Cutter - were to form the basis
for a new image and a new series, the "Stage" series on which
Calzetta is presently working.
The image in the No More Henry print was more three-dimensional than
anything Calzetta had done before. The object looked like a toy dog or the
Trojan Horse. This common response to the print was far too specific for
Calzetta and he started to play with the image until it became more ambiguous.
The image in Greedy Cards was the next evolution.
"Greedy
Cards"
64" x 60" |
© 1983 |
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Notice that the valance-like sky studded with stars has evolved in Greedy
Cards into a real valance studded with decorative red dots. The "curtain,"
motif of Needo Park and the "inverted curtains" of Never
St. Ives are here much more realistically presented as curtains. The
strange image sits against the bright yellow background light. This object
which has been called variously a purse, an antique flat iron, a fob seal,
and an oriental bell - is not yet quite definitely on a stage; it could
be sitting on a table in a house in front of curtained windows. We arrive
finally at an unarguable theatrical stage with the painting Chinese Tie-Cutter.
"Needo
Park"
66" x 72" |
© 1983 |
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"The
Chinese Tie Cutter"
48" x 93" |
© 1983 |
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THE "STAGE" SCENES
As I am writing this, Calzetta
is working towards a new exhibition which will be held at the Mira Godard
Gallery in May of 1985; it will be a show full of new directions. All
of Calzetta's work since his undergraduate days has been done with a roller;
in these current paintings he has returned to working with a brush. Although
the redrawn borders remain, now in the form of a proscenium, the "events"
depicted now fill the entire canvas. His colour is more complicated and
magnificent; the background fields glow as the underpainting hints through
suggesting movement.
The image in Greedy Card is already undergoing transformations.
In some of the paintings, it has become a strange building with open doors;
in others, it seems to have turned into animal-like rocks; in yet others
the image expands to become an operatic Stonehenge-like grouping of objects.
The "stage," too, is undergoing changes as the series progresses;
in some of the new paintings the columns and capitals of the proscenium
do not meet; there are strange disjunctions.
"Well," says Tony, "it's a stage and it's not-a-stage.
I'm always wanting to disorient the viewer a little."
Pinned to the studio wall are some thirty small sketches of ideas for
"stage" paintings; I noticed that in one of them, the gathered
stage curtains seem to be turning back into something that looks suspiciously
like clouds.
The sense of fantasy and magic which was present in the "Titanic"
series continues here; the scenes in some canvases are powerfully dream-like.
These new paintings are increasingly complex. "Abstract art is only
painting," said Picasso in 1935. "What about drama?" There
has always been drama of sorts in Calzetta's work - the massive energy
of the line in the "Cloud" paintings, for example - but from
the "Titanic" series onwards, and strongly in the present "Stage"
paintings, the canvases seem to be expressing, as well as themselves,
dramas, dream-like stories. I don't mean that they are depicting events
or that they are in any sense "literary" but rather that they
seem to invite us into a created world where something portentous or magical
is about to happen.
TENTATIVE SUMMATIONS ...
Calzetta stands apart from
the flow of fashion in Canadian painting. The art "establishment"
tends to ignore him or dismiss him as "decorative;" this pejorative
seems to mean "merely pretty" or "insipidly sweet"
or "lacking in vitality."
Calzetta replies darkly, "You have to consider the source of the
remarks." He goes on: "My only demand of a painting is that
it works visually. I'm aware that my painting is decorative and that's
exactly what I want it to be. My use of decorative elements is very personal
and I'm using them in a personally unique way. I'm not placing myself
in the company of Matisse but decoration is one of painting's most valuable
elements. If people want to argue whether the decorative elements are
well or badly done - that's a different thing but to say that "decorative"
is bad is to deny incredible masterpieces - Picasso, Matisse, the Fauvists,
the entire colour-field movement... stupid statements like that negate
our history...
It seems to me that Calzetta's unfashionableness is one of his strengths;
unlike many young painters, Calzetta knows exactly what he wants to do
and does it. He heads stubbornly against the current because he has a
destination in mind. Although his work is elegant and sophisticated -
his very playfulness is, of course, held against him he is far from being merely pretty because his decorative aims are always counterbalanced
by that other element in his artistic make-up - by the vitality and uniqueness
of his imagery which springs from the depths of his personality and which
is expressed with great physical power and passion in the nervous energy
of his line.
As I've noted earlier, Calzetta was very defensive about the growth of
prior organization in his work. He felt this way, I am sure, because he
knew then and knows now that, ultimately, his art is magical and inexplicable.
But like most artists, he came to realize that this power could be tapped
in different ways. He is not a prolific painter; he completes perhaps
twenty canvases in a year. Much of his time must be spent in mental planning,
in mental editing, in letting the image and composition of a canvas grow
in his mind until the time is ripe for him to face the canvas with a brush.
But even at that point, even as the charcoal line goes down, the painting
is still a voyage of discovery.
"Earlier, it was a physical struggle being spontaneous on the canvas,
developing an image that was mine. Now the thought process is an organization
of the image before the painting starts but the feeling is actually
in the physicality of doing it. I may think that this is going
to be red and green but until I start to do it - that's when the feeling
of the kind of red, the kind of green happens."
It is the contradictions between "romantic" and "classical,"
between sophistication and magic, between the spontaneous and the formal,
that give Calzetta's work its unique tension.
Philip Ottenbrite of the Mira Godard Gallery said: "The history of
Tony's work has a real logic to it and a sense of progression. He has
a very personal sense of style and elegance is the essence of that style.
He makes everything he does look very easy but that ease has been worked for. He's bringing something new to painting. I don't want to inflate
things but his work has a certain... majesty. He's unique. His work fits
into no category and of course he's suffered because of that. I can tell
you one important thing from personal experience. The work of many painters
- it dies on the wall after two months. That never happens with Tony.
Energy emanates from a Calzetta canvas and keeps on emanating. He's poured
so much energy into the canvas, you see, that we keep on receiving it,
the picture keeps growing and expanding for us."
And that, perhaps, is a good place to leave Tony Calzetta for the moment,
in his studio in what was once an old vaudeville theatre, standing, brush
in hand, in front of a large canvas taped to the wall. His head is on
one side as he steps back to look at the field he is working on. The underpainting
is like a ragged net of pink, yellow, and blue.
Over this, he lays a stain of blue so that the colours beneath show through
as ghostly presences. The portable radio is broadcasting an interminable
interview with a gynecologist but Tony does not hear a word. He is now
applying over the blue stain diagonal strokes of purple. The gynecologist
keeps using the expression "the contracepting woman." Now, Tony,
to my dismay, is scruffing a dreary khaki colour over the field. Not really
looking at the array of tins, he mixes a shade of pink, his eye always
going back to the canvas where against the field he is working on rises
the charcoal outline of the latest image, which since the last painting
has transformed itself into a building with a curious spire, a Gaudi building,
melted, disorienting.
Two hours later, catching him at a time when he's standing back, looking,
I say plaintively, "Lunch?"
POSTSCRIPTUM
Since I wrote Paintings
about Painting, Tony Calzetta's work has continued to evolve. It seems
artificial to me now to discuss his work as paintings-in-a-series or in
terms of the paintings gathered together for a particular exhibition.
To do so is to distort what actually happens in his work. The word "evolve"
is also possibly misleading in that it suggests a movement forward. I
have come to see in the five years since I last wrote about his work that
the paintings and drawings are very much a continuum and that the work
does not march "forward" but circles continually, going back
to earlier images to modify or remake them in some amazing new context.
His stage paintings, for example, with their curtains and their strange
central objects - buildings, boulders, indescribable things - suffered
sea-changes into compositions even more marvelous. The stage curtains
which threatened to turn back into "clouds" turned instead into
dazzling white-on-black calligraphy, odd, Arabic-looking, like the pseudo-calligraphy
on tenth-century Arabic bowls. And the stage itself disappeared and the
objects which had occupied its centre moved forward to fill the whole
canvas. And the waves from the earlier paintings returned but in a different
form...
But how is it possible to describe a Calzetta painting?
On a recent return from some years in France, Jack Pollock, who'd first
shown Tony's work, was looking at some of the recent paintings and drawings
and said to me, "This is work that couldn't be anyone else's. It's
full of energy and it's work stamped with all his qualities. He has his
own visual vocabulary which he'll explore and enlarge all his life. You'll
never find Tony flitting about exploring styles or trends. He's painting
his own unique world as all great painters do. And he has his own colour-bank.
He's impeccable. Gorgeous. No one else, for instance, would dare do that
with pink. There's a real centre in Tony's work. Everything grows from
it. The lyric quality of it is getting stronger too, a real sense of play,
of joy. There's a childlike innocence about a lot of the work. Arrogance,
too, of course. He makes things seem effortless. He's very much like Calder
and Miro in that."
During the last three or four years Tony has been turning more and more
to drawing, producing pictures of exceptional beauty and power. The drawings
explore the same imagery as the paintings but tend to be more complicated
and more subtle in execution, the grounds more complex in colouration.
Nicholas Metivier of the Mira Godard Gallery said of Tony's last exhibition
of drawings there, "His work is whimsical and humorous and there's
an absolutely joyous quality about it that people can't help responding
to. The reactions of people at the show are interesting. They'll ask of
a central image, "What is it? What's it supposed to be?" They're
puzzled. You'll hear people say, "It looks like a stump", "It
looks like a molar", "Is it a castle? "And they'll drift
away only to be drawn back to admire the colour in the foreground or the
calligraphic scrolling in the background and eventually they'll just stay
to marvel."
And I have stayed and marvel with them.
Ottawa 1984-1989
JOHN METCALF is a short story writer, novelist, editor,
and literary critic. Of his last book of stories, Adult Entertainment,
the Washington Post wrote: "His talent is generous, hectoring,
huge and remarkable." In recent years, he has been entertaining himself
writing vitriolic attacks on Canadian literature's sacred cows, an activity
which has not endeared him to the literati. In addition to the eighty
or more books he has written and edited, he has written about Canadian
painting and photography for Canadian Art, The Malahat Review, and for the Canadian Museum of Contemporary
Photography.
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