John Bentley Mays,
the Globe and Mail's art critic, wrote of Tony's paintings: "In
the last analysis, Calzetta's paintings represent nothing, except precisely
themselves." This is, of course, their great strength but viewers
insist that his images look "like" other things. Tony's second
exhibition at the Pollock Gallery consisted of a series of paintings which
featured panels dashed with oval gestural shapes which were described
by a friend as "warring eggs."
These ovals, the shapes more suggested than completed, are executed in
charcoal on fields of ivory-coloured PVA [an emulsion and extender for
acrylic paint]. The interiors of the ovals are lighted with a dash of
white paint. The PVA rectangles are set against, and often on, other rectangles,
so that some times the effect achieved is of a collage. In some cases,
the PVA panels are, as it were, "hanging" from the top edge
of the painting. In others, the illusion is given that the PVA panel is
a paper peeling from its background. A background rectangle or field can
break into the foreground PVA panel. The black charcoal line framing a
rectangle can suddenly extend up through a field of colour to join the
anchoring black frame of the entire picture.
In the "Smi" series, the background fields usually run to the
redrawn border in a conventional manner; the eye is constantly surprised
by the compositions because the frame of the painting is always being
denied, the expected borders are always being broken. Indeed, one might
say that "breaking the tyranny of the frame" is one of the objects
of this series.
In The Garlic Show, the composition is brilliantly balanced. The
heavy black mass in the bottom quarter of the painting is in fact a very
deep purple. This balances the heavy black lines underneath and on the
right of the PVA panel. The striped field which surrounds the PVA panel
is a soft purple, almost lilac, and the lines are scored through the lilac
to reveal the PVA colouring beneath. This establishes a relationship between
the colour of the PVA panel and the lilac field; the eye is held by the
massiveness of the composition yet at the same time moved constantly by
the subtleties of colour.
 |
"The Garlic Show"
87" x 63"
© 1978
|
The gestural shapes in rich charcoal, the playing with borders, the striping
and scoring, the "accidental" pleasures of the rollermarks and
the PVA surface textured by the streaks and whirls of the charcoal dust,
the impeccable and quite gorgeous colour - this second exhibition is already
beginning to reveal what is characteristic in Calzetta's work.
But revealed also for the first time is a prime characteristic so far unmentioned.
The friend who described these paintings as representing "warring eggs"
was expressing something of great importance. Kay Woods mentioned the influence
on Calzetta of Motherwell, Johns, and Bush. She might also have mentioned
Cy Twombly, Philip Guston, and Alechinsky. But just as important as the
influence of these artists was the influence of the anonymous artisans who
drew the comics and cartoons of his childhood. Calzetta has spoken again
and again about this influence on his work. "Warring eggs" as
a description is at once silly and perceptive because in Calzetta's mature
work there is nearly always some thing humorous and playful; most of his
paintings are immensely cheerful and this humour results not only from line
and colour but also from his basic conceptions of painting.
THE THIRD EXHIBITION: THE "CLOUD" SERIES
Calzetta's third exhibition
at the Pollock Gallery in 1980 was an amazing experience. It was the first
time I had seen this work. I wandered into the show more or less by accident
and was stunned by the vitality of what I was looking at.
On every wall there were variations of this immensely powerful image,
this strange, rather funny, involving, well. . . thing. The child-like,
cartoon-like representation of a cloud - for that was the origin
of the shape - had, in every case, a stem. Why?
"Because I didn't want it to be too specific or referential. It's
a cloud but it's not-a-cloud."
One of these paintings is hanging in my house and the shape has been variously
referred to by visitors as a cauliflower, a mop, a brain, and an engorged
sexual organ; this may say more about the visitors than about the painting.
The idea of using rectangles stained with PVA, an idea which had evolved
from his work in the "Smi" and "Warring-Eggs" series,
presented Calzetta with greater compositional problems than it had previously;
the vitality and indescribable power of the charcoal lines of the "clouds"
drew the eye magnetically and he had to work hard to balance the pictures.
He achieved this by a variety of devices; by the vibrancy of the colours
in the fields, by sensitive modulations of colours in the fields, by playing
compositional games with borders, and by the use of stripes and dots of
intense colour on a ground of a different colour. Such devices as diagonal
stripes on one side and dots of strong colour on the other hold the central
image in a pleasing tension, preventing a divorce between the white central
panel and the rest of the field.
In Marigold Mumble, for example, the redrawn border of the entire
picture is an intense charcoal black which is repeated in the border of
the PVA rectangle and this simple repetition is amazingly effective in
holding the composition together. The stripes further connect these two
borders. The background field is a dull, textured green and the stripes
which lead the eye to and away from the central image are so violently
pink that they ought to be offensive but are somehow simply beautiful
- a magic with colour that Calzetta often works.
 |
"Marigold Mumble"
84" x 64"
©
1980
|
John Bentley Mays said of
these paintings: "They document no recognizable reality, but simply
commend themselves, with elegance and masculine beauty, as objects of
creative work worthy of our attention." I haven't the faintest idea
what Mays meant by "masculine beauty" but he is certainly right
to draw attention to the elegance of Calzetta's painting. This is, perhaps,
another manifestation of the same sort of contradiction I'd noted earlier
between "romantic" spontaneity and "classical" formality;
a painter whose cartoon-like work is at the same time fastidiously elegant.
THE FOURTH AND FIFTH EXHIBITIONS: THE "WAVES" AND "TITANIC" SERIES (1981-82)
These two exhibitions marked
various changes for Calzetta. His association with the Pollock Gallery
ended and the "Waves" series was exhibited with the Mira Godard
Gallery which still represents him. The "Waves" and "Titanic"
series marked a new pitch of excellence in Calzetta's work. In the five
years since his first exhibition, I suspect that Calzetta's artistic direction
had been changing steadily away from the extreme "romantic"
pole of his personality and moving towards some middle ground; the increasing
importance in his work of playfulness and wit, qualities not notedly "romantic,"
intensifies in these two exhibitions. That is not to say, of course, that
he had rejected spontaneity but he now seems to have much greater faith
in his professional abilities - though it is obvious in watching him paint
that the process is still a matter of intuitive discovery.
The "Waves" series was exhibited in the Mira Godard Gallery
in 1981 and the "Titanic" series in the Robert Kidd Gallery
in Birmingham Michigan, in 1982. The two groups of paintings were not
executed in strictly separate series but flowed back and forth as the
imagery evolved over the two-year period. For the sake of convenience,
however, I'll consider them as separate periods of work.
THE "WAVES" SERIES (1981)
With this series, Calzetta
did something quite extraordinary; he took the cartoon "signs"
or "shorthand forms," as it were, of land and seascape depiction
- the stylizations for wave, star, rain, moon, storm - and combined them
to form seascapes of lyric beauty. Not only are the seascapes possessed
of a genuine lyrical quality, they are infused with a gentle humour. Calzetta's
command of colour, always impeccable, here blossoms into a gorgeousness
we had not seen before. These are happy paintings and although the style
is quite different, of course, they exhibit something of the spirit of
Dufy's sailboats on bright water.
This series and the "Titanic" series mark a new level of elegance
in Calzetta's work. It is as if these paintings capture what it was that
he had been working towards from the beginning. We must play down, I think,
some of Calzetta's earlier insistence on the subconscious and the spontaneous
and read those statements as the claims of a beginning artist sincere
in his belief at the time but deluded, perhaps, about the real nature
and direction of his talent. The "Wave" series reveals the mature
Calzetta as a decorative painter of great refinement, elegance, and sophistication.
Common to all the paintings in the "Waves" series is the fact
that the central panel, the "picture," is presented only as
part of the entire painting. The seascapes are presented to us as though
they are papers stuck onto backgrounds or as slides projected onto screens,
or as close-up views of something from a larger, more cosmic context;
background fields, quite separate from the "painting," are studded
with stars, brilliant lines streak away from the "painting"
like comets.
The reasons for these initially off-putting compositions are doubtless
complex, but I think that Calzetta realized that had he filled the entire
canvas with the "seascapes," he would have been defeating himself
on a variety of fronts. First, oddly, the entirely artificial "seascape"
- this assembly of cartoon signs - would have become in some way less
artificial had it filled the entire frame. Second, had it filled the entire
frame, its prettiness would have become cloying. Third, the viewer would
have been tempted to respond to the painting in a way that Calzetta would
have deplored.
Because the "pictures" are presented to us as papers
or slides within a larger context we are doubly reminded of their artificiality.
We are reminded that we are looking at a painting of a painting, as it
were. This distances us and prevents us from looking at the "seascapes"
with our traditional viewing baggage; our awareness that someone is playing
games with us tempers our response to the sweetness of the scenes. In
essence, we are being invited to enjoy a celebration of stylization.
THE "TITANIC" SERIES (1982)
Calzetta always paints in
series because his imagery is constantly evolving both within and between
series; what in one series will have been a detail might in another become
a central image. As we will see later, details in the "Titanic"
series evolved into the central idea of the paintings he is presently
working on.
Into the "Wave" pictures, Calzetta introduced a new image, something
floating on the waves. This image was sometimes rounded as in Sheba's
Pleasure or roughly rectangular as in Never St Ives. He calls
the series the "Titanic" paintings because a friend said that
the rectangular image made him think of the funnel of a sinking ship.
"Sheba's
Pleasure"
52" x 66" |
© 1982 |
|
What can be said about these paintings? What are these things? The slightly
rounded object in Sheba's Pleasure sits with immense solidity against
its ground like a vast beach-ball; the waves dance in front of it with an
energy in their charcoal line that is entrancing; the object has round its
greenish body a band or ribbon of brilliant red. It is , of course, a waste
of time to ask what these are; as Mays said, "they simply commend themselves."
.
"Never
St. Ives"
64" x 96" |
©
1982 |
|
Never St Ives illustrates beautifully the way that Calzetta's images evolve and undergo metamorphosis. I'm not quite sure, but I suspect it is a painting late in the series, The waves with their marvelous nervous energy are there from earlier paintings, the diagonal lines in the background, the "rain" is still there, but new elements have appeared. The sky, studded with bright yellow stars, now appears to be changing into some form of canopy.
The "Titanic" series as a whole shows fantasy as an increasingly
insistent element in Calzetta's work
continued
on page 3 of essay |