Bound Figure, 2016
Material: Sewn & Bound Cloth, Yarn over a wire armature.
Dimensions: 5″ x 3″ x 5″
“Man is soft flesh in a world of hard reality” (unknown author)
Bound figure is an expression of the futility of humankind’s ability to be free in the face of political violence and terrorism. The small bound figure appears to be a victim of brutality and control. His soft body made from wrapped cloth serves as a bandage and protective layer from war torn environments across time. Bound figure is a solitary symbol of menace, vulnerability, and displacement, held by the imposed force of histories dissolute and abhorrent images of human perversities and misfortunes.
Ronald Gonzalez, Born 1952 Italian/Spanish American
Ronald Gonzalez is a contemporary figurative artist based in upstate New York. Since the mid seventies the artist has worked from his garage studio creating elegiac sculptures and installations that are embodiments of death and loss infused with grotesque narrative, and pathos. Gonzalez works primarily in a series with steel armatures and macabre collections of time worn objects, and detritus from his surroundings. The work is then further eroded with metal filings, burned wax, glue, wire, and black soot creating a dramatic tonal range that both obscures and reveals anthropomorphic heads, torsos and figures that appear as charred fetishistic mementos possessing a visceral quality imbued with a sense of primal energy and distress that permeates his work. His obsessive production of angst-ridden sculptures explore the emotive, social, and psychological associations of decaying found objects that function as autobiographical metaphors charged with potent and recurring symbols with childhood and nostalgic references. Gonzalez’s sculpture is mournful, conformational, and estranged, standing on the border between human personage and doomed phantom. His restless investigation of animating materials has produced an art of dissolution with archaic, apocalyptic, and quasi-alien elements that convey an animistic mode of thought and intensely evocative expression of the human condition.
His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D C. De Cordova Museum & Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA. Savanna College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA. The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS. Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MI. Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY. Museum of Contempory Hispanic Art, NY. University of Southern California, LA. Allan Stone Gallery, NY. Salina Art Center, KS. Intar Gallery, NY.N.Y The Hudson Walker Gallery of Art, Provincetown, MA. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY. Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Spoleto Festival, Charleston,
SC. Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame, IN. Atlanta College of Art, GA. Gallery 24, Berlin, Cavin Morris Gallery, NY, Alternative Museum, NY. Institute Cultural Peruano Norte Americano, Lima, Peru. Art Omi, Ghent, N.Y. Rhode Island School Of Design, Providence, RI. Muse De Arte Modern, Buenos Aires, Argentina.