In 1958, the St. Lawrence Seaway was inaugurated finally making Buffalo’s Erie Canal Obsolete. Buffalo, “the Concrete Atlantis,” once the point of passage for millions of manufactured and raw goods, began a steady decline. Buffalo’s sudden geographical isolation exacerbated a problem of national proportions: the decay and transformation of the American industrial city. Gone were the halcyon days of urban planning, of large, Bauhaus style projects. Construction in most of urban America slowed to a trickle as industry took flight. Buffalo, the Jerusalem of Jeremiah’s lamentations, was left a shell of its former self: empty Frank Lloyd Wright structures standing stark, empty, their destiny suddenly unfilled.
Time did this to Buffalo. An unforgiving sort of time that only leaves the residue of process in its wafe. Finding, collecting time’s traces is the work of historians, academics, perhaps even of certain artists. Bill Maggio, a native of Buffalo, has made it his business to materialize his city’s process of decay, invoking through his most recent collage and mixed-media work a larger metaphor of change both human and elemental.

Maggio constructs his complex pictures with transparent simplicity, invoking, among others, Johns and Rauschenberg.  The residues, scraps of billboards, shards of rusted metals, or lengths of rubber tubing, are found on street corners, at bus stops, and beneath overpasses.  With these, he refashions the increasingly lost messages of the city in all their human potentiality: perhaps we have forgotten them, will continue to pass them by, but they remain, haunting phrases or scraps of phrases, wind-blown and mildewed, reminders only of ourselves.  One such piece equivocates between “URGE” and “URGENT” communicating a pale emergency in a truncated language.  Another tells us something is perhaps both “BEST” and “NEW,” as the image tears away from the blatant falseness of the advertising copy.  Still another mixes a woman’s leg set into a classic Rita Hayworth pose, a broken doll’s arm, and words whose juxtaposition seem to spell “DRIOS” (dress, or perhaps dross?)  and “FRIEND,” just the sort of message that casts the potentially obvious into the region of enigma.  And then there is the drawing, a sort of unrolling strip which Bill Maggio scrolls over the work, both connection and severing the elements of the collage.  Here is time again, a Mobius strip whose final destination we are not allowed to see, the sort of time that is onrushing, merciless, irrevocable, like an Old Testament God in its final and inscrutable intention.  But still, the concern here is not the quantity of time passed, but rather the living, breathing quality of its passage.  This affects us too, our cities, our families, our world.

Bill Maggio’s work speaks immediately to contemporary concerns, both in its subject matter and pictorial accomplishments.  In his work’s examination of the quality of our lives we find a deep humanism, thankfully alien to much postmodern myth-making, to demands of “media-profiles.”  The industrial landscape which we seem to be able to deal with only in our science-fiction, constitutes this artist’s nature.  The mirror he holds up to it provides a difficult, beautiful, if disappointing portrait of ourselves.

June 4, 2010

William C. Maggio’s paintings at Western New York Artists Group

In his Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s treatise on the origins and nature of drama, he notes that the tragic poet Aeschylus initiated the use of a second actor. It was a crucial event in the creation of the dramatic art form. Before Aeschylus’s innovation, there was one actor and a chorus, which was only a kind of semi-character. An observer, a commentator. (A little like a critic.) The introduction of the second actor enabled real dialogue. It enabled conflict.

Something of the sort happens in the paintings of William C. Maggio, the solo featured artist in the current Western New York Artists Group show at One Linwood.

All the works are abstract, white on black, the white in wave patterns or striations, as if produced by sgraffito technique abrasion of wave pattern or striation low-relief raised elements of a more or less uniformly prepared, with plaster or gesso, canvas or board flat surface, exposing the white underlayer beneath the black overlay.

Many of the works are titled Presence, with a number. What’s present in all these cases being something nondescript, some shadowy, tenuous, larger form—still consisting elementally, as it were, of the wave patterns and striations—emerging from the black background. But something singular, in both senses of that word.

Whereas, in a few of the works, the sgraffito markings, instead of simple wave patterns or striations, are elegant script forms, joined letters, or what clearly look to be joined letters, though on closer inspection, the letters are not quite recognizable, so the words they seem to make up again reverting to the category of nondescript, scratched into the black overlay, it looks like, with the wooden point end of the painter’s brush. But suggesting writing, verbal communication, dialogue. Two now, instead of one. The second actor. Drama.

One remarkable and somewhat anomalous piece, called ha-kotel, which I was told is Hebrew, meaning “the wall,” features imagery elements including sedimentary-like horizontal bands, erratic wave forms, and sgraffito marks again suggesting script, but now just barely, that is, even more primal looking and essentially nondescript than in the Wall Talk series. The piece evokes the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the site and depository of generations of silent prayer and meditation, lamentation, grief, regret.

In an artist’s statement accompanying the exhibit, Maggio talks about how the works are intended to encourage a meditative and prayerful state of mind. Overall, they are reminiscent of the work of artist Mark Rothko, whose similarly numinous presence paintings inspired the idea of installation in a non-denominational religious-type chapel.

The Maggio exhibit continues through July 6.