Gallery 25N is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings and pottery by Sergio Gonzalus-Tornero. This exhibit is part of the "One World Arts & Culture Festival" a four-day arts festival celebrating African, Latino/Hispanic, and Caribbean-American cultures created by The Paramount Center for the Arts.

Mr. Tornero, finds inspiration in Haida Native Americans. His paintings are a fusion of two distinct things: his compulsion towards modernist form, together with a sympathetic fascination with the historic culture of the "Haida" Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. Mr. Turnero explains how he arrived at his fusion of Haida culture and modernist forms in this way.

"This work has developed since my first visit in 1994 to Haida Gwaii, "Land of the Haida", also known as Queen Charlotte Island, a misty archipelago of a hundred stormy miles off the costs of British Columbia and Alaska. I have returned there many times. This has become a defining experience. My work is an outsider's painterly adventure into the spirit of an aboriginal world.

For many years I have been looking at its art, sometimes finding in it a universal relevance. I respond with a visceral excitement to its formalistic quality, which I see as being akin to what I like in modernist art. At the same time I empathize with a profound sense of cosmic awe, which I perceive in it.

I make paintings based on images from that world.

Also I have been reading narratives told by the last great Haida myth tellers to the ethnographer John Swanton around 1900, while making small paintings which are subjectively motivated by them, and titled with locutions extracted from them. Swanton used a phonetic system devised at the American Museum of Natural History for the purpose of recording Native American oral literatures.

More recently I have started a series of packet-size paintings on mat board - epiphanies in red and white. These images are abstract distillations of my experience on the Northwest Coast. Most of them were done in Haida Gwaii. Later they are composed in groups of nine, the Nonets".

Mr. Tornero was born in Chile, studied in Chile, Brazil, America, England and France and is living in the U.S.A. since 1962. His work has been exhibited and is in numerous collections around the world including: Museum of Modern Art, NY- Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY - San Francisco Art Institute, CA - National Museum of Fine Arts Santiago, Chile, to name a few.

This exhibit of his paintings and pottery can also be seen during Peekskill's "First Friday Celebration" September 1 from 6:00 - 9:00PM. Come and enjoy the arts, free entertainment, events, and artist's demonstrations.

Exhibit

September. 1 - 30

Gallery 25N
25 North Division Street
Peekskill, NY 10566

Artist Reception

Saturday, September 9, 4 - 7pm

Gallery Hours
Friday - Sunday
1:00 to 5:00 PM and by appointment

More information about the artist and his work is available at: www.gallery25N.com

For information contact:
Edward Burke (Director)
914-293-0811
mail@gallery25N.com
www.gallery25N.com