Contact Numbers, Exhibition Announcements, Links and Email....Art Statements

(607) 753-7934 Home
(607) 423-3476 Cell
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A NEW OPEN STUDIO EXHIBITION:

‘CROSSROADS’
NEW WORK BY RALPH TURTURRO

OPENING MARCH 30TH 5PM-9PM
SHOW RUNS FROM MARCH 30th THROUGH APRIL 20th

At The‘STUDIO GALLERY’117 HOMER AVE.CORTLAND, NEW YORK

The ‘STUDIO GALLERY’ is located at the crossroads of Homer Ave. and West Main streets in Cortland.

GALLERY HOURS: TUES. - THURS. – 4 – 8PM WEEKENDS BY APPOINTMENTFOR FURTHER INFO CALL: C# 607 - 423 - 3476 OR H# 607 - 753-7934

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

‘Crossroads’ signifies, for me, a place, a spot, a state of being where the work at present continues to find itself. My most recent paintings, more than any other time before, mirror the crossroads I am experiencing in my life.To depart from some instance or happening in my waking life, in a consistent manner, each time I approach a painted surface, with the intention to somehow discover what is to be saved from that experience is in essence the objective of the work at hand.I am finding a connectivity, in the process of working, that responds to both inner and outer stimuli. Outwardly, I have in my life, as well as my observations and readings, been drawn to the dualities that emerge as creator and created. Of creating flesh and blood characters who live in conflict and contradiction - where does the life come from; from the author’s experience and observations or from the alchemy of the scratched surfaces; from inside; a self - perpetuating life?I on the other hand, in response to these other voices (authors – musicians – poets – thinkers), become as subject; identify by immersion into the depths of these characters as if I breath their air - from inside out they move.The experiences of books of fiction and non fiction have become one of the main sources of departure expressed in this new work.The ‘abstract nature of words’ have always attracted me - the layering of time and space; the structure that holds myriad emotional subtleties - what is said as well as what is not said.In my case it is the subtext , the ‘silent un spoken’ that fuels the imagery of this latest series of paintings.


also - some other links to current places to view Turturro's work:

Paintings displayed on new site below click on Turturro -
http://www.studiocivale.com/


Also:

art exhibition
april 10–july 9, 2007

The Artists, the Visual Arts Committee,

the Cultural Resources Council, and WCNY
invite you to attend the opening reception ofShowcase #59.

Reception:Friday, April 13, 2007,
6:00-8:00pmatWCNY Studios,
506 Old Liverpool Road, Liverpool,

NYfeaturing work by:
Ralph Turturro

and finally:
http://www.cmarket.com/catalog/landingPage.do?vhost=playwrightshorizons
Here you will find if you select "View Auction Catalog" Turturro's 'SUNYATA' IS UP FOR AUCTION!



E-mail: : rtmac571 23@yahoo.com/








STATEMENT - IN PROGRESS ( Updated – 08-26-2006 ):


The work is about trying to break through the physical to a world beyond that is more real . The color, texture, text and inadvertent images that grow out of the process of painting are the tools used to discover this world beyond. As of late I think of my work as one would consider the life of cells. They are real and exist despite their relative invisibility. Without them we could not exist. They hold in them, history, beauty, balance and wonder. They communicate with each other silently without explaining. They continue to evolve, mutate and produce life.
…streams of consciousness...along side of image...written words...letters - they're in my work - words and letters in a stream of conscious and unconsciousness...trusting the flow...discovering the uncompromising truths that belie the process of constant looking, drawing, administering, arranging ...composing...painting...it is one process among many that employ these universalities...that ideally can teach you to love, to accept, to have compassion and reverence....it is a process, at times, that can stop all time...make things clear, invite the spirit, bring back the awe of lost moments...rush ahead to the prophetic....at the same instance this process can make you giddy, and bent over with laughter...speaking to the absurdities; the underlying joy behind most things...the certainties, uncertainties, the ambiguities, the truths, the lies ....
I am drawn to rust and corrosion the way others are to flowers. Give me a graffiti wall; a stained sidewalk; a beaten-up old wooden school desk.... any day...
I have been looking at Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' for this past year, the sounds, the rhythms, the unpredictability of each word and their relationships...I appreciate each page for what ever I can draw from it...it humbles, it liberates, it beckons me to paint, to walk, to look, to discover...it strengthens my resolve to need not understand the mystery but to live it.
I paint with oils and Acrylics in particular Golden Acrylics and Mediums as well as waxes, sand, wood shavings, scraps of wood, canvas, other paintings, newspaper, cardboards, matt boards, magazines, and any other interesting surface builders I discover along the way. A piece of rusted crushed metal on the roadside is likely to find its way in one of my paintings.




LESS SAID
DICOVERING THE POWER OF VISUAL WRITING AND TEXTURE
NEXT GALLERY at MCNY SEPT. 5 - OCT. 27 2006

Painting is still something that continues to fill me with wonder and awe. It is like being an archeologist discovering found objects that send you reeling back and forth through time. Everyday it brings you closer to your mortality, demands that you face yourself for better or for worse, teaches you to accept and cherish loss; the unmitigated truth of it, the horror, the beauty...
Understated; Open Spaces; Unresolved Endings; Socratic Inquiry; The Inherent Truths in Contradiction; Things that make sense; Things that do not make sense; Palimpsests; Illegible Markings that can either be Letters or Figures on Active Surfaces, Worn away Names/Dates on Grave Stones, Old ships, Walls etc...these are some of the Texts and Textures that fuel the work ...need I say more...
Matisse said " Artist's (Painters) should cut out their tongues...”



STATEMENT - IN PROGRESS ( Updated – 10-20-2004 ):
The man at the Texas diner told me “our entire lives were merely images
stored on micro film since the time of Christ and that the Government
Stored this micro film”. The strange part of this is not that this man thought
these things and said these things but that I did not so easily dismiss them
and that even till this day, 20 years later, I still consider that there is something
to his story. Just the idea of possibility; of the outrageous; the impossible.
Like a painting, life often appears to have no concrete connection with our immediate flesh and blood reality. Life, like a painting in it’s micro and macro insurgencies continues to reinvent itself. Forge ahead as one reality after another.
Where do films exist? “ The Stepford Wives” exists in a can, in our minds in our culture…could it happen? Could Hitchcock’s “Psycho” happen? Psychos and Stepford like wives, unfortunately happen too often amongst our species. And Mankind, to deal with it turns it into ‘ART’, into a virtual space we call Film-Movie-Motion Picture - Photo – Paint - Art!
In the case of the Man in the Texas Diner it is a personal, obscure memory from my flesh and blood experience that has now transformed into what it is: this strange ephemeral dream like artifact that informs my curious nature; that makes it’s way into the virtual spaces of this writing. It makes me cynical but hopeful that anything could be true and that quite possibly everything we think is true, is not.
This gives me great cause to paint. To be filled with wonder on a regular basis. Especially when encountering things that are real. That reek of real. And then comparing them to what is accepted, almost common place –taken for granted, everyday real.
Our day to day lives are filled with fragmented bits of flawed facts, multi-medias, pseudo-knowledge and fleeting intuitions that “Abstraction” shouldn’t seem so foreign a word or at best, not be so categorized as it is. Most things we do have aspects of the meanings of this word – ABSTRACT
.
We dream and then forget and then have ‘De Ja Vu’ . We retell the dream or the De Ja Vu experience to friends at work. These are abstract events. One thing turns into another. A blow up of a small section of something till it becomes very far from it’s origin. Till it forgets it’s origin.
There is nothing more abstract than everyday life. The difficulty is in separating what is real from reality. It happens in micro and macro places of our cells, our brains, our homes and schools. One way to balance all this stimuli is to turn it into virtual space. Painting is one option.



PREVIOUS ARTIST’S STATEMENT: ca. 2001-2003
In the way that one might discover the innate beauty that exists within the colors of rust or a patina’d rock or a stain on ashphault or cement pavement that has that rightness of relationships and alchemy; that “Yaki Way” of finding the most, best position for sleep; in this way it is ‘Beauty’ that is the intention of my work…“ Beauty is Truth, Truth, Beauty” Keats
Discovering the beauty and rightness in every day life - in the oddest places - happens without planning. It compels me to see my life and my work moving together in a subjective time frame, responding to moments in a day of observations - stimulated by: conversations, music, road signs, lyrics, poems, etc. These experiences become inspirations to paint and while painting inspire departures to make marks, build textures, seize colors and images.
Ultimately I believe painting is not painting at all, it is seeing; it is a way of being in one’s life. Painting shows me what I am, where I am and what I understand. It is my perceptions and how they evolve over time. The biggest draw painting has to offer is that it sparks the way to what I’ve yet to see.
Abstract painting is the structure, the mode, the style which best conveys the experience of painting as real, not second to the experiences that inspired it. During the process of drawing, scratching, brushing, cementing, dropping and throwing, a trust and confidence builds; the paint begins to transform into a life on it’s own that has witnessed and been there and through something; a thing that has learned to organize itself through attrition, through a life system that is in and of itself “new’ and free of the artist’s will and hand.
Finally the subjective time frame is shed; trusting your life to this work; remaining open for the objective consciousness to take over and inadvertently a new, abstract narrative forms - a language, a visual language – about your life; one that is as enigmatic to me as it is to the viewer; one that becomes as many things to me as to the viewer– the ego is lessened, perspective changes and the work becomes ecstatic and more importantly the work becomes the ‘Experience’, ‘The Thing’ and the ‘Reality’. My only claim to the creation of a given work is having recognized it