NYAB Event - Carmen Cicero “Early Works: 1970-1980s”

Carmen Cicero “Early Works: 1970-1980s”

June Kelly Gallery

This event has ended.

An exhibition of paintings and watercolors by New York artist Carmen Cicero, works filled with mystery, satire and edgy images of life, opens at the June Kelly Gallery.

The exhibition, entitled Early Works: 1970s-1980s, reveals Cicero’s tensions and agitation as bare and unsugarcoated truth. He combines pointed candor with comic apparitions that reflect his reverence for life’s veracities and vagaries, his obsession with storytelling, and the humor he finds in our lives.

Cicero’s art has been on the cutting edge for more than 40 years. He arrived in New York in the early 70s after a devastating fire that destroyed his studio in Englewood, NJ. He lost all of his canvases, press clippings and other records in the flames, but he was able to begin again in his new loft on the Bowery. The Bowery, then an even grittier neighborhood than it is today, was filled with flophouses and bums and was New York’s “Skid Row.”

Cicero began to formulate his ideas into new themes from which he produced colorful, manic paintings, like giant drawings of comic book pages. The paintings are deeply personal, yet enigmatic, and expose the surreal alliances that he postulates among his subjects, replete with double entendres. The results are original, quirky and hypnotic. He brings a remarkable inventiveness to his work, and his symbolism stirs a sense of mystery and foreboding. He gives fresh evidence of his creative vitality in this exhibition.

Cicero’s use of humor with frankness is coupled with his search for deeper meaning. His tone and spirit produce eerie quietude and stinging bluntness but also create mystery and curiosity for an explanation for these unusual and strange happenings.

Cicero is master storyteller with his commentaries about life, as shown in his oversize canvas entitled The Surprise in the Window, 1981, in which guests at a party are horror struck when a caped figure in white outline appears against the dark skies in the window of a penthouse apartment. Or, in Crime, 1976, in which Cicero’s thick maze of colorful lines gives us an angry figure with a knife who seems to offer no way to avoid a figurative or literal onslaught. These evocative scenarios are painted with Cicero’s meticulous detail with color, line and careful brushstrokes. There is a suspension of emotion, as if one were waiting for a turn of events.