The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Landscape -delusions of grandeur (preparatory state) 1993 Installation comprising 15 pieces: customwood, chipboard, mirror, bitumen paint Collection: The artist Giuseppe Romeo was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1958. He participated in the first of many group exhibitions - 'First Australian Sculpture Triennial', Latrobe University- in 1981, the year he finished his studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. Subsequent group exhibitions in which he has participated include the Second and Third Australian Sculpture Triennials, 1984 and 1987, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the First, Second and Third Australian Contemporary Art Fairs, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, 1988, 1990 and 1992; 'Correspondences', Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1991; and the 1992 'Moat & Chandon Touring Exhibition'. He has held solo exhibitions since 1989 at the Luba Bilu Gallery, Melbourne, his latest being 'Recent Works', 1992. Winner of several awards and Australia Council grants, the artist received the 1991 Andrew and Lilian Pedersen Memorial Prize for Drawing and Small Sculpture, Brisbane, and the 1991 Diamond Valley Art Award, Melbourne. His commissions include a sculpture for the National Gallery of Australia's cafeteria and a cover design for the National Gallery Society magazine. Giuseppe Romeo's work is represented in public and corporate collections in Australia AUSTRALIA GIUSEPPE ROMEO and NewZealand including the Queensland Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. As an artist working with both form and imagery which are theoretically confron- tational, Giuseppe Romeo has achieved both unstinting critical acclaim and an unusual degree of popularity. His energy and commit- ment have always been abundantly evident in his work. His pieces have been described as robust, spontaneous, extravagant and whole-hearted in their embrace of vulgarity, gaudiness and excess. Romeo has always acknowledged a fascination for and an affinity with the colourful shrines and naive local statuary of the small, southern Italian villages of his Calabrian heritage. The resulting works - and certainly his best known- are generally huge, lavishly painted wood sculptures which incorporate both his own fascistic private demons and references to the Fellini-like images of the street floats and garishly votive objects of Italian festivals. For Romeo, the creative process involves ongoing cross- referencing and dialogue between the uni- versal, the particularities and commonalities of ordinary life, and the intuitive psychological connections he makes between them. 108 Romeo works in a large warehouse in an outer industrial suburb of Melbourne; about half of the warehouse is taken up with the storage of his father's breadmaking ma- chines. As with the many collected objects in the studio, such things play an important part in the internal dialogue which informs the resonation and process involved in 'the making' and, finally, what emerges from the studio as finished art. When encountering a problem with a particular work, Romeo often 'goes for a walk' in the studio to look at what is there and in most cases he finds the connection he is seeking. Sometimes the walking around will suggest a new direction for a piece, and things just left lying around in this way (such as a group of bones) are often given a 'surface', either of paint or of one of the industrial materials that he employs. Giuseppe Romeo's piece Landscape - delusions of grandeur ( 1993) actually relates more to the works he showed in a recent exhibition in the Luba Bilu gallery in Mel- bourne - a series of smaller works which were black, severe and minimalist in vein, employing some of the simple grids and pointed stakes which characterised his student work in his final year at art school. He talks of needing, from time to time, to move deliberately away from the exuberance and theatricality of the more expressive works into a simpler, more conceptual mode. For Romeo, the two ways of making art inform each other and create an ongoing dialogue which strengthens the work overall. It is as though the artist must regularly engage in a kind of personal discipline- to pull himself back from the intensity and wildness of the brink of his own excess. John Buckely