White Dogs and Warhol

White Dogs and Warhol and Other New Drawings

by Tony Calzetta

You are invited to the opening of my exhibition

Thursday, April 23 from 6 to 8 pm

at the Fran Hill Gallery Show Room

285 Rushton Road, Toronto

Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm or by appointment

In addition, for the duration of the exhibition I will be at the gallery Thursdays from 4 to 7 pm

Preview a selection of images at http://artishell.com/calzetta/5drawings.html

Text by John Metcalf:

What are these strange shapes, these tree-things, these ruins, these castle-like buildings, these rockets or missiles, or meteors that whoosh from splendid skies? It is difficult to define them and that is exactly Calzetta’s intention. Conceptual artist Damien Hirst entitled his stuffed shark floating in formalin The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a pretentious title suggesting dark profundity. Tony Calzetta entitles one of the oil pastels shown here — a sort of tree, two mounds, and an exploding rocket-like thing — White Dogs and Warhol. His titles, bearing no relationship to the drawings 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; we can only respond visually. He invites into a world of sumptuous colour and strange drama, into a world crisply conjured in dense charcoal and graphite. His work is filled with a massive energy. That charged energy keeps flooding 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 humour and set up a perpetual clamour for attention. Their élan energizes us.

John Metcalf is currently writing Marigold Mumble: The Art of Tony Calzetta.