“Art is language, and the body is the site of language.”
For Don DeMauro, the body is, by its existential nature, nomadic and migrates to the figural. Art is equally anatomical and political, personal and social. The body is the site of conception and sensation. Art mediates and interprets through line, shape, plane, tone and color. This dialectical tension determines the responsibility and choice necessary for an aesthetic and social formation.
In the end, these works—these things presented and represented—need to be made well enough and then nurtured, so that the work speaks for itself. Visual art wants to give physical matter its own sensate logic. A voice in a larger metaphysical conversation.
“As a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and teacher, Don DeMauro has restlessly explored the figure as a timeless form, detailed presence, and an evolving identity. He revolts against the stale contrivances of academia, and steers away from the windblown whimsy of style and fad. He is committed to his visual truth with sincerity and without apology.
Through circumstance and poetic mind, DeMauro transcends mere convention of place and time: romantic, but skeptical and sincere. It is without contrivance that he furiously collects, not to hoard or to possess, but to create – seeking to breathe life into the lifeless, and to regain a lost voice. He is the transistor of resistance and a reminder of the lost. His process, biography, and images are seamlessly intertwined.”
From Curiosities of the Object, a 2010 exhibition at Spool Contemporary Art Space, curated and written by Zach Seeger
About the artist: “I was born at the cusp of a second world war on August 19, 1936, into a second generation Roman Catholic family that consisted of three brothers, our parents, and myself. It was a family under economic stress and consumed with serious health issues. This particular context of societal and familial breakdown fostered an existentialism that was consistent with and nurtured by my own evolving instinctual philosophical perspective.
This existential perspective, grounded by its opposition to all inherited forms of transcendence was consistent with and key to my own existential formation. Concepts of immanence, singularity, multiplicity and becoming, could and would ground my aesthetic and social choices. It interested me that “art” was a socially functional strategy for the existential impulse.
At this point it is necessary to acknowledge my commitment to the “figure” in my work. Art is language, and the body is the site of language. For myself, the body is by its existential nature nomadic and migrates to the figural. The term figural wants to acknowledge singularity, multiplicity, form, boundaries and becoming. Art is for myself equally anatomical and political, personal and social. The body is the site of conception and sensation. Art, and here I will include drawing, mediates and interprets through line, shape, plane, tone and color, the internal and external intensities of boundaries and their entanglements.”
