KELLY WRITERS HOUSE

Gerard DiFalco:
Retrospective 1988-2001

Madrid Dreams, Strega Myths

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

"Part One"

The Kelly Writers House Art Gallery curator, Peter Schwarz, asked me to compose an Artist’s Statement for this exhibition. Despite my intense hatred for writing artist’s statements, I managed to provide Peter with a brief, three paragraph message that began: "The most important visual elements in my paintings are: 1)color; 2) manipulation of light, shadow and perspective; 3) design." I then went on to describe my works as single frames of a film frozen in action. The commentary’s closure communicated "my works have been influenced by four key elements: 1) the Latin American literary school magical realism; 2) my two experiences while traveling and living in Spain in 1987 and 1990; 3) what AIDS has done to both society and individual lives; 4) Witchcraft and magic."

I glanced over my little statement and, not allowing myself the time to reflect upon it for fear that I would discover what a cop-out it was, I quickly emailed it to Peter. Much to my surprise, Peter—who over the past six weeks had discussed with me various topics related to the exhibit as well as: the meanings of art and life; politics; American sexual mores and how Spaniards refer to us as Los Puritanos (the Puritans); the practical freedoms of Amsterdam; Philadelphia’s need for a red-light district; God, religion, and today’s society; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—had the audacity to ask me to elaborate on my pitiful attempt to disguise the fact that I hate writing about my own art.
Really! I thought to myself as I listened to his mellow request over the phone. "Of course," I responded, yet rolled back my set of inner eyes in their make-believe head. "You’ll have it this week. No problem.


"Part Two"

To write about painting is like painting a writing exercise…in ten minutes, of course. I do love artists’ quotes, so let me quote some artists, just to break into my exercise of painting a statement.


"Part Three"

"Art is never chaste and should be kept from all innocent ignorants. If people are not ready for it, they must not be allowed to get close. Yes, art is dangerous. If it’s chaste, then it’s not ART."
~Pablo Picasso

"There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment."
~Jackson Pollock

"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
~Francis Bacon

"Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing."
~Salvador Dali

"To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams."
~Giorgio DeChirico

"…the object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity."
~Alberto Giacometti

"Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."
~Francisco Goya

"If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens."
~Grandma Moses

"Art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind."
~Louise Nevelson

"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks."
~Simonides (500 B.C.)

"I am an artist…I am here to live out loud."
~Emile Zola

"My ideas come from reflecting on my life and the lives of people I have known and have been in some way inspired by."
~Faith Ringgold

" Part Four"
I was born and raised in an urban, East Coast environment. New York, Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey were my worlds until a regrettable move to the suburbs at age eleven. I never overcame that shock and quickly returned to city living as soon as I entered Rutgers University’s Camden campus at age seventeen (1970). I was home among bricks. Vacant lots strewn with broken bottles, hypodermic needles and flowering weeds had happily replaced the manicured lawns, pristine row houses and streets named after Ivy League colleges. I had crossed back into reality from a pseudo-world of malls, vanishing farms and parking lot Meccas, and I never returned to the nightmare called suburbia.
The city’s hard edges, shadowy alleys, neon night colors and wildly heightened and vertically exaggerated forms had already shaped my visual aesthetic. And since the city was filled with stories that has many possibilities (many cultures, many languages…a hetero cosmos, if you will) so did my works of art. The fact that I came from an extended family of jazz musicians, woodworkers, beats/hipsters, Roman Catholic mystics, bootleggers, storytellers and academics seeded my urban imagination with many colorful pages. Then the Sixties happened, and I had to grow up in a suburban high school that actually called in my mom for taking me to see an Igmar Bergman film and buying me a copy of Ginsberg’s Planet News. I was glad to get back to the city’s color, manipulation of light, shadow and perspective, and hard-edged design.
The subjects of politics, AIDS and witchcraft interest me; therefore they are frequent themes in my art. Why they interest me are topics for another essay. Suffice it to say that to write about painting is like painting a writing exercise, and I hate to write about…painting.

"To paint is to create magic. To write is to perform magic. To paint and write is to be magic."
~Gerard DiFalco