Essay for Raphael Collazo (1943-1990) Memorial Retrospective
Essay for Raphael Collazo (1943-1990) Memorial
Retrospective
Peter Bermingham, 1992
A well-schooled former child prodigy, a draftsman
who constantly filled notebooks with sketches, advice, and assorted
cues, Raphael Collazo was a latter-day romantic who found a world
of stimulation in places as different as New York, Vermont, and
Rome, and in materials as different as wallpaper, oil paint, sandpaper,
tar, and wood.
I had only one opportunity to meet with Collazo in his tiny studio on the upper west side of Manhattan. A vivid memory of this 1986 visit was the sight of this short, slight man carrying, despite my protests, large wooden sections of paintings and hanging them with military precision in a space confining beyond humane limits. All I saw at first were hands, feet, and backs of paintings, but as the latter were turned and joined, small miracles began to happen. The large painting I purchased for the Museum was called Goodbye Rococo, and was a sort of valedictory for Collazo, a fond farewell to the flowery sentiments and stylish motifs that keynoted much of his work in the early eighties.
Goodbye Rococo captivates by its insistent contrasts. For example, a beautifully rendered swampscape is completed by flowers on musty wallpaper; a cloth duck and a sandpaper satellite float upon the scene, while sumptuously painted waves are transformed into fish or "completed" by dry bark. It all works, I think, in a way best described by Joshua Taylor's reflections on Robert Rauschenberg written in 1974. "The most stirring beauty," he wrote, "comes from order found, not order given, as if its permanent harmony existed precariously in a transient and unpredictable world."
Collazo's found order was rooted in something more visceral. Forced to explain this once (in a Rome Fellowship application, of all places), Raphael remarked that he wanted "to touch some deeper action source, achieve excitement, beautiful excitement, painting excitement, the excitement of paint." He would have agreed, however, with Rauschenberg (like Collazo, a Morris Kantor student) that there "were no short cuts to directness." Collazo's "directness" was, indeed, often calculated, almost inevitable.
In his early work (through the 1970s), Collazo displays a broad array of places, things, and ideas which held his interest throughout his life, whatever changes in method and interpretation they would undergo: lush vegetation, stylish women, exotic places, angels, birds, marine and architectural motifs, mythology, and certain evident qualities such as magic, celebrations, and a consistent belief in the continual fertility of abstract expressionist ideas. His ties to more traditional modes are articulated in nearly all his work by his use of a conventional landscape space (foreground, middle ground, and distant space), sometimes explicit, sometimes illusive. Only in a few powerful late works, Arc (K) of 1985, for example, is his "landscape" dark or brooding.
As with a speaker cut off in mid-sentence, Raphael Collazo's premature death leaves us with few clues about where he might have gone next with his art. That's just as well. In a memorial sample like this, such guesswork masks real accomplishments with sentiment, and special gifts with excessive nostalgia.
What we can all share here with Collazo is a brief life well spent, continually sparked by a lively, inquisitive mind, a somewhat quirky, stop-and-start energy, and above all, an attitude towards art and art-making that never excludes the viewer as partner.
Peter Bermingham, Director and Chief Curator of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, curated Collazo's 1992 exhibition Raphael Collazo (1943-1990) Memorial Retrospective.
Catalog, Raphael Collazo (1943 - 1990) Memorial Retrospective, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, October 4 - November 22, 1992, curated by Peter Bermingham.