Dance of the Blessed Spirits | Carlito Dalceggio
October 4th to November 19th, 2016
GENESIS
Mexico City, summer of 2015. Two broken ribs force Carlito Dalceggio, the somber spectator of his body’s inertia, to remain motionless for two weeks. Art of the 20th Century, a book about modernist masters and contemporary greats, becomes his main channel of creation. No book laying around him is spared; he cuts through them, destroying some. They become the source material for his creations. One of Cézanne’s most ubiquitous paintings is the first to disappear beneath his smotherings of colour. The Van Goghs, Toulouse-Lautrecs, Douanier Rousseaus and myriad other pieces soon follow. Within a week, Carlito had drawn over 700 pages, reinterpreting each classic in his own manner. Carlito reinvents these flat surfaces, phantoms of an artistic past that pervade still. His free-spiritedness allows him to incarnate the cogent evolution of these creations. He paints, draws, covers, and transforms every single one, page after page. A classical musical piece, The Dance of the Blessed Spirits, accompanies him through his creative trance, its ivory notes setting the tone for the war waged between the colours. He does not contemplate Van Gogh’s Fields of Wheat, but permeates it, basking in its sun, wind, and madness.
The book scrawled over through and through, Carlito begins to reunite the characters he encountered in its perusal, sprawling them out onto large white sheets of paper. Down with gravity ! Picassos character’s - like Matisse’s, Van Dongen’s and Munch’s - are set free. With these cut and ripped images, he deconstructs modern art, leading a new dance into a mystical bardo, indeed, a theatre, in which all of these immortal spirits appear. New compositions flourish, with hints of savagery. Piece after piece, he covers the floors and walls of his studio, free from any abstractive or figurative notion. Paying tribute to a bygone art history is of no importance; all he seeks to achieve is becoming one with painting. This process results in a series of ten canvases, within which he progressively forgoes iconographic sampling, and increasingly invests raw energy. Dance of the Blessed Spirits marks Dalceggio’s return to Montreal (Canada) after two years spent dwelling in Mexico City, traveling through Asia, and presenting a host of highly publicized projects. He offers a very generous and colourful exhibition free of any conceptual framework. A laboratory dedicated to the research of novel mythologies and rituals, which blend painting, sculpture, fashion design, scents, installations, music, poetry, voice, and light.
