Timely, Timeless is RJ Calabrese’s debut solo show with Rosebud contemporary, NY.

Timeless, no: no more than our own time. Timely, however, yes. We live in a world as senseless as that portrayed by RJ Calabrese, as violent and as perverse. The difference is we imagine our own world is governed by reason, not whim. We ascribe the cruelty of our world to wickedness which we think is an exception, not seated in the very diaper of God, where it is the center of gravity for all being.

In Calabrese’s world nonsensical grotesque violence is unabashedly the rule, and perhaps that is why for all its outlandish and elegant monstrosity it seems so familiar. Underneath it all we know violence, domination and cruelty are banal and common, even if we pretend, they are an aberration from some imagined ideal essence just beyond reach, to which we shall return. But alas, as Calabrese shows us, our fate is not grace, but gross, and our end comes not with a bang but with a whimper.

– Andrew Paul Keiper

Sandpaper beards and the grotesque – RJ Calabrese and his anatomy of the absurd

RJ plays with the absurd the way children play in the sandbox – with abandon, verve, and astonishing focus. His mixed media works, on display at Rosebud Contemporary in an exhibition titled ‘Timely, Timeless’, test the biological absurdity of our bodies, coating them in shades of humor and oblique eroticism. The images first magnetize, then utterly arrest the viewer with warring sensibilities: why can’t I look away from something so attractive, yet so strange? RJ’s art does not shy away from the grotesque, from the real. Images of dismembered bodies writhe behind stately architecture. Fantastical humans with hairy legs and doom in their eyes rise above a natural landscape bleached of the very life spilling from the guts of its human overlords. RJ’s engrossing work posits a strange but simple belief, almost childlike in its intensity: you can’t look away from something so strange, yet so attractive.

For the academically inclined viewer, RJ’s characters seem to traipse off the pages of a picaresque novel, right onto his panels. The picaresque figure is necessarily a country anti-hero, whose response to an unstable, degenerating world is a sense of “misery, degradation and powerlessness”, in the words of academic Javier Herrero. Perhaps, we think, humanity is a scrappy, playful thing, selfish and unchanging, capable of emerging unscathed from the foibles of society. It is tempting to cast RJ’s works in this light, but he offers a more complex etiology for his images. His visual influence partly derives from 16^th century grotesquerie, which Renaissance art historian and painter Vasari once described as “a kind of free and humorous picture produced by the ancients for decoration of vacant spaces… grotesque pictures [made] outside of any rule, attaching the finest thread to a weight that it cannot support, to a horse legs of leaves, to a man the legs of a crane, and similar follies and nonsense without end.”

Why, then, is RJ concerned with such anatomical follies? Why bring these hybrid, ornamental grotesqueries, created to exist on the fringes of more socially stalwart images, and make them the center of attention? The first reason is that of play. Take, for instance, the marbled heads found in the works ‘Procession’ or ‘Bunker Room 2’. Punctuating the lines of wood bunkers, pools, and landscapes, are heads. Delightfully round and shiny, they look like miniature planets arrested in orbit, obviously separated from their larger anatomy. They double as bowling balls, furniture, passengers strapped to the backs of unearthly animals. RJ’s little heads of state command the viewer’s attention, tempting and tactile. If Lewis Carroll had some polymer clay, human hair and a block of wood, even he couldn’t dream up the absurd, delicious humor of these rolling heads.

Another recurring feature of RJ’s playful image-making is the rodent. Despite its size, the rodent connotes any number of nefarious, degenerative dooms. It splatters blood wherever it walks, clings between legs, courts the attention of its human overlords with threatening, insistent humor. Similarly divested of its head or its torso, RJ’s pests erupt out of eyes and mouths. One even roosts on a windvane like some urban harbinger of death and rot, clothed in, of all things, underwear. For the viewer, who may have freshly escaped the subterranean madhouse that is the New York rat’s primary residence, RJ’s rodents offer a resonant, humorous irony that only heightens our overall experience of his work.

Thus, we discover the second reason for RJ Calabrese’s centering of the absurd: his preoccupation with sensation. Despite the apparent urban accoutrement, RJ’s rodent-infested underground mazes have a far more ironic origin. As a current resident of the Jersey countryside, the artist says he is engaging in “strategies of contradiction”, imagining great hysterias and disastrous fallouts emerging from the quiet, broad-leafed verdure of his country residence. Yet despite such imagined calamities, he notes that his most formative relationship with sensation comes from a 1940s interactive children’s book titled ‘Pat the Bunny’, by Dorothy Kunhardt. Designed to teach children how to experience sensation (a fascinating feat in itself – are we taught to sense the world, or is it an innate proclivity?), one page instructs children to feel ‘daddy’s scratchy face’, and rub the sandpaper beard cut into a cartoon father’s chin. It is an odd, mad way to make sensation and image fit together. And of course, it is this very irony of artifice and humanity coexisting so unharmoniously that has tickled the artist. 

We are creatures of contradicting sensations negotiating a mad world, these works seem to say. In the end, the artist must center the one figure that is most absurd, and languishes most in sensation: man. RJ’s male figures are diffident, morose things. Their world is a dystopian superstructure they had no part in creating. Their surrounding wildlife includes rats and sabertoothed pests; human hair, RJ’s persistent symbol of the absurd in these panels, erupts from their sternums. Despite it all, these characters accommodate their surroundings with something like stunned nonchalance. Their eyes are off set, their attitudes irresponsible, almost apathetic to the instability surrounding them. Yet their moody acceptance of the odd world they find themselves may help us embrace the absurdity of our own environs.

In his description of the grotesquerie, that revival of antiquity and playful image-making, Vasari notes that such works “[contain] monsters deformed by a freak of nature or by the whim and fancy of the workers… He whose imagination ran the most oddly, was held to be the most able.” By the great man’s definition, the whimsies of RJ Calabrese suggest a mind most able, a hand most original. “It is the merging of disparate things,” RJ says, the marriage of “three-dimensional elements that are not harmonious with the picture plane” that generates sensation, hooks us to the image. Excitingly, it also generates a tremendous tactile craving in the viewer (a message on the gallery wall reminds viewers to restrain this desire).  We are back in the sandbox, playing and feeling. Dad with his sandpaper beard stands by, warding off this mad world for only so long.

– Karen E 2024