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By Ralph Turturro |
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Born in New York, 49 years ago, my two earliest memories are - first at 2 yrs. of age; I would pull all the detergents out from under the kitchen sink and make sculptured pies on the living room floor - the second is of a 4 yr. old boy, standing alone in a long empty driveway, watching cats walk in and out of the backyard; the colors were: green - gray, warm black and a very intense Dutch Yellow Light. Some painters who influence my work are: van Gogh, Kandinsky, Pollock, deKooning, Rothko, Twombly, Tapies, Basquiat, Schnable, Anselm Kiefer, Terry Winters and John Walker. Painting is something that continues to fill me with wonder and awe. It is a process not unlike like being an archeologist discovering found objects that send you reeling back and forth through time. Everyday it brings you closer to your mortality; demands that you face yourself for better or for worse; teaches you to accept and cherish loss as an indelible element of time; the unmitigated truth of it as well as its horror and its beauty. The objectives in my work are always the same: to recognize the things that continue to evolve and thrill me in this life such as: balance and imbalance, persisting ambiguities, understatement, open spaces, unresolved endings, continuous questioning, the truths in contradiction, palimpsests, illegible markings, graffiti, old, re-varnished wooden school desks, active, rusting surfaces, worn away names/dates on grave stones, old ships, walls, etc.; to harness these |
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things in the energy of the paint and to trust then that the work expresses who I am and where I am at present. The ultimate goal, however, is for discovery, where when the work is done, you are as viewer, discovering these texts and textures for the first time as if you had nothing to do with them but to appreciate the ability to recognize and embrace. Less Said is a title of one of the works in my show and an aesthetic I hold dear. It is a term used to express the space that remains when one holds back from saying anything more than is necessary. I am always aiming to say the most essential things about what ever at the time is pressing but “best laid plans” smacks me in the face and the process is so seductive that I fall prey to its grasp. So the thing I have learned to do is to allow everything and the universe to happen, don’t deny the pleasures....but to always come back and pair it down, balance it out, stay away from what it means, from anything that whispers profound. It is simple and formal. It is problem solving - it works! it doesn‘t work! It is when you strip down to the least of it all that the universe begins to become more clear, more true, hence “Less Said”. I paint with oils and acrylics, in particular Golden Acrylics and Mediums incorporating wax, sand, wood shavings, scraps of wood, canvas, other paintings, newspaper, cardboards, matt boards, magazines, and any other interesting surface builders I discover along the way. |
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