The found objects Ronald Gonzalez works with are from yesterdays. They speak of past events and personal experiences in their embodied histories. Time is a magic that allows past, present, and future to coexist. The artist is a mediator between these temporal worlds. The past is a memory, and what Ronald Gonzalez seeks and what he finds is never the same thing. Objects are of our own making. Ronald Gonzalez is drawn to their rare degraded status that coalesces into poetry. He desires to make something human from them through intimate forms and an emotional charge that transforms their identities. The head in sculpture is a precedent form in the figurative tradition and a primary vehicle for persona and the imaginary. Ronald’s concern is for a thing portrayed, a fusing together of animate and inanimate elements captured as human expression born out of this moment.

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Artist biography

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, confrontational, 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.

GAS MASKS

The five gas masks torsos are a series with apocalyptic and fearful references, they are blackened, and arm less self-contained fragments that serve as sites of internalized trauma. The work is made from found gas masks, rubber tires, and tubes, wire, wax, soot, over welded steel armatures.

Ronald Gonzalez's work in sculpture has been centered on the human form, and the use of time-worn found objects and materials that can be transformed and re-imagined. Masks have a long and ancient history and will continue to be a part of our future. Their recent evolution encapsulates how much life has changed where the mask has become a focal point for strong emotion and political commentary. In art and life, one is always working against the clock. Ronald is using time as raw material. Time passes through him and is transmuted, transformed by a process where the moments of his life go in and are made over, and sculpture comes out of the figure factory. The things he collects and uses to make sculpture speak to his identity where objects are affixed to memory and stand-in for Ronald's sense of mortality and humanity. As an object, the gas mask is poignant and highly charged with strong meanings ingrained into our cultural psyche and a well-established symbol. Ronald Gonzalez prefers working with old gas masks stamped with human and historical associations. They have such an expressionist spectral quality and character based on human anatomy while referencing other biologies' such as insects with their tubes, round eyes, and streamlined extended faces that look bio-mechanical. The gas mask is anxiety-provoking with allusions to violence and threat even without embodiment. It is an object emblematic of this century as well as the last, paradoxically human, and yet a strangely mystifying counterpart. As the world hangs in the precipice of doom and uncertainty, the gas mask has returned as part of today's future.

Exhibitions

Ronald Gonzalez 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, N.Y. Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, NY. University of Southern California, LA. Allan Stone Gallery, NY. Salina Art Center, KS. Intar Gallery, NY. Anthony Brunelli Gallery, Binghamton, NY, The Hudson Walker Gallery of Art, Provincetown, MA. Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY, Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY, Jonathan Levine Projects, Jersey City, NJ. V.23 Gallery, London UK. 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, NY.Rhode Island School Of Design, Providence, RI. Muse De Arte Modern, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Art Basel, Miami Fl. Galerie Protégé, NY Galerija SULUJ, Belgrade, Serbia, Menier Gallery, London UK, Czong Institute of Contemporary Art, Gimpo-Si, Gyeonggi- do, South Korea, Aqua Miami, Fl., Space Millepiani, Rome Italy, Los Angeles Convention Center, Los Angles, Ca. Art in Embassies, Benin, Africa, Guerrilla Zoo, Newspeak house, London UK, George Billis Gallery, NY. Sculpture Fields of Nova’s Art. Bridgehampton, NY.