The Launching of the Dream Weapon
By Francesca Rascazzo
The Launching of the Dream Weapon, the exhibition of the latest exciting works of Chris Capuozzo, is at its end at Sandra Gering Gallery in New York. The exhibition represents a world of dreaming, the dream of what appears to be the real world, and what comes into the viewer’s mind out of this void of translation. The drawings and collage paintings speak through the personal graphic language of the artist. This language comes from his graffiti writing background and from 20 years of collecting imagery of surreal, psychedelic and fantasy based nature. In the psychedelic forms, the artist finds a sort of culmination of the culture around him. He makes obsessive drawings, cutting out some elements, and piecing them together in collages. During this activity, the artist watches the composition emerge, and at the same time watches unintended narratives develop. "I’m constantly thrilled by watching these random elements come together and speak in some new way," he says, explaining the intuitive technique of his work. Symbols, letters, characters and designs engage in a play of overlay and surround the face of a meditating or sleeping man, as you can see in Free Rise or in Internal Transfer. "Animals barter with savages and letters, letterforms are distorted, humans gaze at animals interacting with geometric shapes, or are themselves meditating, lost in glassy-eyed stargazing and rampant psychedelia," says the artist about his drawings and collage paintings. All that comes out from a broken earth, all which is excessively falling down from the earth has no place in a real world; only in the real clouds on Chris Capuozzo’s character dreams.
