Recent Works

At Winchester Galleries on Humboldt Street

March 12 - 28, 2009

Opening:
 Thursday,March 12, 2009
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Some baffled viewer called the oval shapes in the painting “No Tomatoes” eggs, “warring eggs”. What are these eggs, these strange shapes, these buildings, or ruins, these strange vessels that float upon placid waves, these meteors or rockets that whoosh from splendid skies? It is difficult to define them and that is exactly Calzetta’s intention. His titles, bearing no relationship to the paintings whatever, discourage definitions and speculation. The shapes that inhabit his canvases and drawings have no meaning we can paraphrase. His aim is a purely aesthetic one. He invites us into a world of sumptuous colour and drama, into a world crisply conjured in dense charcoal. His paintings and drawings are not representations; they are beings.

As his biographer, I have watched on many occasions as the charcoal screams down the canvas, as he draws directly with an oil stick, as, utterly lost to the world, he scumbles a background with a sponge. His work is filled with a massive energy. The energy he pours in keeps on coming out. These paintings and drawings never die on the wall. We cannot over time come to ignore them. They brim with life and joy and set up a perpetual clamour for attention.

In these days when the thin gruel of conceptual art with its earnest little pieties dominates, what a rare and joyous feast Tony Calzetta’s work affords us. He is a playful and gorgeous Cavalier in a decidedly Roundhead world delivering to us work that is inexhaustibly beautiful.
John Metcalf