Sub-Rural, #58, Carmon Colangelo

This 2021 quote below from Carmon Colangelo  cites a moment in his 20-year survey opening this month at Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis. The show coincides with the final semester of the artist’s 20 years as Dean of The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. This is the 3^rd piece I’ve written on the artist. If that seems high consider that the artist has had 12 exhibitions at Bruno David in those 20 years.

“I immediately saw the computer as a tool in 1985 as another way to manipulate, distort, repurpose and translate images so I could work more quickly and make more engaging prints.  It seemed a natural extension of printmaking process where I was using Xerox transfers pre-computer in my prints as a way to make drawings on stone or plates. New and old technologies together seemed like the way to layer images,  often creating unexpected and often awkward mash ups and results. I am interested in the contours of  hybridity but more importantly creating a woven image and a palimpsest, more than a collage, fusing layers and having traces of the earlier source as a referent.

A few years later I wrote the following.  “Colangelo’s paintings begin with an assemblage of analog drawings and itinerant digital images that are excited by the positive or negative charge of light in their vicinity. These are printed on canvas, then applied over another more traditional substrate of gestural acrylic compositions. The top layers have numbers of cut spaces that enhance the composition while providing glimpses of shapes below, occasionally in contradiction to the dominant image. The pictures aren’t so much paintings but extruded assemblages of paint flow, collage residue, and brushwork texture.” The work became more graphic, metallic, and serpentine. Popular visual media such as tattoos, automobile decals or Gothic typography enabled the artist to imagine a more popular structure sub-narrative for enlivening the work.

Much of Colangelo’s paintings continue to follow a turbulent, unusually performative formal path, to observe in all his 2D work including handmade books. An imaginary soundscape is even legible among the steady accumulation of formal cues and visual texts. Many images resound subtly, and are girded with vivid reverberatory chaos.

“Window Garden,” and “Mind Over Matter are two works suggesting not only the varied histories of modernist abstraction and autobiographic notation, but auditory conversion, with a dynamic color range of free tonality and a storm of exploratory cadences. Reinvented musical notations escape through a sea of the raucously illuminated “Window Garden.” Here a pliant arrhythmia, a complexity of visual syncopations, and polyrhythms are nearly audible and performative.

Atonal harmonies in “Mind Over Matter” are more naturalistic and balanced. Yet they’re also funkier, full of vernacular swing and anti-formal make believe. An excavation of a pink-trailed movable feast littered with extraordinary objects could only exist in paintings with such graphic anxiety about color and space. Colangelo fills the composition with charged awkwardness, daring to include variations of color and form that at first glance seem foreign to his reverie of post-intergalactic probability. His command of surrealist space and symbols bleed collective improvisation.

“Cartesian Twist” is a work on canvas that explores light velocity shooting across the page and freezing in an incalculable super-dimension. This volumetric sound-image is a symbol that demolishes the all-over composition he prefers. Here the background is vacant except for a frosty cerulean. The radical geometry enhances its twisting, ultra-prismatic double helix spike.

The most extraordinary is an earlier work titled “Bare Life Big Melt II”,  a cliff-dwelling lithograph and photogravure hybrid with a toast to an inexplicable end- of-history narrative. Symbolic excursions are not foreign to Colangelo’s history of printmaking where he’s a master of graphic de-interpretation but usually the images are aggressively fractured and meaning is circular rather than tunneled. Colangelo’s manipulation of Midjourney AI production designed one of the most radical hybrids of print, photoshop, and painting conceptualizations of his vast internal inventory of visual language.

“Bare II” is a deep narrative post-apocalyptic dream, catastrophic for sure, but seductive and uncanny. A gigantic lord of black bears poses on the roof of extruded institutional architecture and surveys a firmament of orbiting, bat-winged mammals, uprooted evergreens, dirigibles from 40’s era cinema, and eerie platypus-like creatures. Two blistering paint spills that tear at the hallucinogenic intra-species battlefield are rancorous framework for this spinning post-Surrealist drama.

Colangelo continues his hybrid path of Primitivist vs. Futurist language with an appropriate blend of cross-media technology and classic studio perspectives about the tension between AI, handmade objects, and his latest samples of thinking out loud.