Column Chronicles: Modern Art reviews - Frank Cotolo on 148.ca

Modern Art reviews

Frank Cotolo
December 2, 2021

My name is Petri Mjunctorch and for fifty years I have traveled all over the planet to review the newest groundbreaking works of art by unique artists.

In a village north of Rome, Italy, I focused on an exhibition by flummoxed veteran Spinelli Ortusia. Known mostly for his cryptic shapes of mold (which he grew in his own basement), most with thumbnail paintings of great Greek sculptures such as the Parthenon and Propylaea, Ortusia's new showing offers an entirely different sense of symbolism per use of pencil erasers.

In one three-dimensional object, he built a Roller Derby rink, using erasers from Number 2 lead pencils. They are clipped together by thin wire sewn between each little rubber and dangle from the ceiling, where the left side of a reconstructed-from-erasers Temple of Hera holds them the way a female badger caresses her young. With small spot lights beaming from beneath, the object takes on a rudimentary soul that seems to shout at the shockwaves which buried Pompeii.

Another object, directly across the room from the first, is a decoration of a declaration swearing freedom from organic suppression. An empty box with the word S T O R K printed boldly on each of its sides, inside and out, is as vertical as it is horizontal, like a plague of locus covering wheat fields on a morning in a tepid climate. Brilliant does not describe Ortusia's rotund creations.

My next stop was Ronda, Spain, for a retrospect of paintings by Donas Mialuna Bosta Parcheesi. The half-Spanish-one-quarter-Italian-one-eighth-and-so-on first displayed these godsmacked canvas strokes of colorful genius when he was twelve. Some of the colors blend with ordinary shapes, making circles, squares and rectangles appearing to be leaving the canvas and trotting out of the room. Donas once said, "I think it is the contagious sharing of blues and yellows that have been sprinkled in salt that creates the illusion of animation." Whatever the source, the largest painting, titled "Clayboy Under A Loaded Riot Of Stickmen," emits the upsetting nature of dunking white bread into thick liquid, which, when it was hanged at the Vatican some years back, caused the Pope to pass a kidney stone.

Lastly, at least for this European stint, I dropped by a gallery in St. John's Wood, London, England, for a quick look at new pieces from Oppie Kinelly. A small room filled with spilled Rice Krispies spread across the floor like a sea of cereal, which it actually was, after all, forming dangerous waves that surrounded and sometimes drowned antique toy boats (Kinelly collected them as a boy and stole the others from other collectors). A citizen of Leeds, raised in the north by a stepfather that was an optometrist and his real mother, who made the eye patches needed for his patients, Kinelly moved to London and was an immediate smash in the 1970s modern art community with his small paintings of human large intestines dancing under strobe lights. "I was the first artist in London to have a Mohawk haircut," Kinelly said, "and I used it as a brush for a mural of Native Americans skipping rope in Piccadilly Circus."

I will be going next to Iceland, where Ted Toopaloo promises to exhibit a gleefully painted portrait of the country's first king on a piece of glacier that recently broke away from its base and drifted two hundred miles south.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.