Ron Giii & Mimmo Paladino

The Atomic Theatre

At Paul Petro Multiples & Small Works
January 6-28, 2006

On the occasion of The Atomic Theatre, a two-person exhibition featuring pastels from 1984 by Ron Giii and etchings from 1982 by Mimmo Paladino

I remember when Richard Rhodes organized an exhibition of Ron Giii's works on paper in 1987 at the Cold City Gallery in Toronto. He had seen "The Atomic Theatre" and "The Dictator's Opera" in New York at the 49th Parallel in a show organized by France Morin in 1986. Some of these works had been shown the year before at Postmasters, also in New York. Following the Cold City show I acquired "Mathematicus" from "The Dictator's Opera" (included in the current show) at their annual Christmas group exhibition. It was my first acquisition that resulted from a purchase rather than a trade or a gift and brought the stake in my personal art collecting to a new level.

At the same time I was working in Yorkville as director of the Evelyn Aimis Gallery. Mimmo Paladino was on the roster of international artists showing at the time. Works by Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia also passed through the gallery and a keen familiarity with their material properties, in addition to an understanding of their connections with Achille Bonito Oliva's "Transavantgardia" (1980), ensued. It had been three or four years since "The European Iceberg" group exhibition had been mounted at the Art Gallery of Ontario. This show included many Italian and German artists, Paladino being among them.

I searched out Ron and his work in the following year, 1988. He had just completed a body of work that he called "The Gas Works" and invited me over to meet him and have a look. Back from New York, he was house-sitting a friend's townhome nearby Adelaide St West and Strachan. He unrolled the works and they emitted an acrid plume of I-don't-know-what that caused my eyes to tear. The works were made up of a combination of materials including varsol, shoe polish, molasses and oil. They were 43 x 29 inch vertical works with a single floating head in the upper middle section of the paper on an amorphous cloud-like ground. He had saturated the paper with vegetable oil before the application and dispersion of the other media. They were portraits of the artist's friend after forty shock therapy treatents. I selected a few of the works for a group exhibition I was organizing and calling "Body Is A Loaded Word".

Over the next few years I would show four additional bodies of work, including a full presentation of "The Gas Works", "The Bourgeois Opera", " The Anti-Conscious" and "The Geometry Shop". I became Leo Castelli to his Uncle Ron (or Johnny Pizza, as the case may be) and our conversations were unlike any other. The war in the Gulf Islands happened some months after the making of "The Gas Works" and became a post-script to the Persian titles he had given the works. I discovered a level of prescience to so much of his work and this idea became manifest in the words he associated with them, in many cases written down on the work itself. Ron's performance work in the 1970's, during and following his schooling at the Ontario College of Art (1972-75) set the stage for his drawing. Ron talks about the "transparent laws of geometry" which inform the compositions his figures inhabit. This architecture finds its roots in the spontaneous activity of theatre, in the false prosceniums which frame the figures in his current work, and in the sets his figures inhabit in "The Atomic Theatre". Ron offers the following equation, " geometry and theatre equals time and chemical space".

An interest in developmental biology further informs the work - DNA theories and genetic evolution. Ron says that "at a cellular level there are molecules which behave in a very specific way, and this behavior became better understood when gene theory reached a certain level. And with AIDS it became politicized." He refers to the lone figure in his work and the predicament of the outsider, who "has no way of speaking out in his or her language without causing problems with the State", at which point he mentions China, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and totalitarian fundamentalism. He states that in 1984 "we were looking at the antics, the shape of terrorism" and he mentions the group exhibition at Postmasters in 1985 where "The Atomic Theatre" works were first shown. He also mentions the return to fascism and the rise of Reagan. Born in 1944 in Westminster, BC, Ron received his earliest schooling in art in Nairobi (1960-62) where his father, a member of the diplomatic core, was then stationed. The influence of African tribal art is a good starting point when exploring the connections between Ron Giii and Mimmo Paladino's work and is apparent in the faces that proliferate in their respective works. In the case of each of these artists the faces are mask-like and the impulse is to find out what is behind these formal surfaces.

With Paladino we encounter imagery steeped in Christianity and Classical mythology, figurative and allegorical, with dominant themes of death and sacrifice. Rather than articulating a theological, mystical or spiritual position Ron's works are deeply philosophical and humanistic. Ron cites influences which include Artaud, Darwin, Hegel, Schwarzkogler, Spinoza and the Frankfurt School, in particular Walter Benjamin. Ron reads the London Economist and the New York Times. The work is non-gendered, existing outside of meaning and representation. Ron says that "getting involved with meaning" is trouble. The simplicity in his work portrays the artist as looking to simplify himself.

The formal attributes that Ron Giii and Mimmo Paladino share in their work ultimately reveal the vast extent to which they differ. The differences become amplified upon extended viewing. The three years between Ron's performance work and the arrival at "The Atomic Theatre" was a period of experimental drawing that landed him in a "journey through space and time with no beginning and no end." His reading of Nietzsche's "Twilight of the Idols" at this time led Ron to "(feel) for the first time that notion of the 'eternal recurrence' which had evaded my art thus far. The faces in 'The Atomic Theatre' smiled like human beings yet they would disappear just when I was on the verge of understanding their emotions. I realized that my drawings were laughing and hiding from me as if they had their own reality. This discovery became the central focus of the work; as each drawing possessed another layer which extended beyond my normal perception of reality. This key moment;, when a sign becomes both real and unreal in the same split second; ws my introduction to the world of the 'eternal recurrence'."

These words, originally published to accompany the exhibition of "The Atomic Theatre" in 1986 at the 49th Parallel in New York, have carried forward with each consecutive body of drawing that Ron has produced over the last twenty-two years. They stand as some of the most significant words on drawing by an artist. In a separate room to the current exhibition twelve new works have been installed. Following the Evelyn Aimis years and a group exhibition called "Heavy Mental", curated by Philip Monk in 1993 at the Power Plant, Toronto, Ron's work has appeared in many group shows and has shown four times at Paul Petro Contemporary Art.

In 2003 Ron produced and exhibited a body of new work he called "The Dreamer". When asked why he chose that title he said, simply, that " dreamers never give up". He telephoned the other day and said, with excitement, that he had "finished another one", at which point he hopped on a bus, the years fell away, labour was rewarded and, well, the feeling was atomic.

- Paul Petro, January 10, 2006