Tony Calzetta

 April 14th - May 5th, 2012

"Untitled #863" 2011, 22 x 30 inches, charcoal on paper

  

RECEPTION:

 
April 14th, 2012  

4:00 - 9:00 p.m. (rsvp requested)

217 Avenue Road, Toronto, Ontario M5R 2J3  

T: (1) 416-537-4699

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Over the past 35 years Tony Calzetta has developed a distinctive visual language of bold, simplified forms where colour, texture and lines jump into a third dimension and dance to life to create works that challenge the viewer’s imagination.
As Kate Regan wrote in her essay Tony Calzetta: Line Dancing, “it was Paul Klee who wrote of taking a line for a walk to see where it would go. In the same spirit, Calzetta invites his lines to spin, zoom, fly, gesticulate and toddle.”
This important exhibition of major works, Calzetta’s first in five years, is a new collection of large scale canvasses and drawings.
Tony Calzetta received his B.F.A. from the University of Windsor and his M.F.A. from York University. He works mainly on canvas and paper and at times in sculpture and printmaking. He has published three major livres d’artiste, Acts of Kindness and of Love in collaboration with writer John Metcalf, and more recently How God Talks in His Sleep and Other Fabulous Fictions and Peculiar Practices with writer Leon Rooke. In addition to commissioned works he is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. In 2011, his paintings exhibited at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Toronto were part of the Padiglione Italia at the 54 th International Venice Biennale. He was elected as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 2004.
Tony Calzetta says: “My work is about drawing. The drawing is about images that are composed of shapes and forms constantly evolving from a highly personal visual vocabulary which started with subconscious doodling and automatic drawing and later from more conscious visual influences. My work can be viewed as “abstract funnies” or “surreal cartoons” which fit somewhere between high art and popular culture. My interest is with image as image and I believe in letting the viewer interpret and create his or her own narrative.”