Person/ Place/ Thing

ronald gonzalez | Recent black figures

7 September - 20 October 2012

Opening Reception: Friday, September 7th   |  6-9 PM

About the exhibition:

Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts is proud to present its second solo show of recent sculptures by Ronald Gonzalez. The exhibition Person/ Place/ Thing is a series of sculptural works selected from a large oeuvre of hundreds of figures created within the last three years. The sculptures are made from steel armatures and objects that have been transformed into blackened figurative personas that appear austere and plague by pathos and apprehension.

The collection of figures presented here frontally and always in an upright gait masterfully intertwines autobiographic and psychological content with the physicality and histories of home as an emotional source from which all things flow.

Gonzalez’s work probes the dark edges of life through daily imaginings and his sense of formal invention with felt body images. His isolated and grouped figures explore universal themes of anxiety, alienation, identity and death and convey distress about human existence with unquestionable gravity and power. The works themselves evoke a gamut of emotion, from wonder and disbelief, to bewilderment and epiphany, reflecting an inner life contained within a make believe, real world of thinking and being. Gonzalez’s figures survive within an overlay of characteristic black color that exists as part of their condition of dissolution that simultaneously binds his sense of self and place within the scheme of things.

“I have always been tethered to this city by a psychological umbilical cord. I escape by giving traumatized objects a human face and body to create an imaginary space. Sometimes I think I would prefer to be an inanimate object to escape the burden of one self. The question is what to be, a clock, a chair, a shoe? I think something worn out by routine and obsession.” - Ronald Gonzalez

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