Beaver’s Nancy Lincoln Gallery is honored to present “Tranqilandia” from award-winning artist Raul Gonzalez III.
Gonzalez’s honors include a Wet Paint Grant and being voted Boston’s best visual artist in 2010 by readers of The Boston Phoenix. In 2011 he worked with over 125 Boston children to create a work titled “and their Families” for the Linde Family Wing of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
The show at Beaver, which runs through May 3, features five mixed media pieces and is described by Gonzalez in his artist’s statement:
Snapshots of the landscape of “Tranquilandia” show us a world fraught with images of poverty and violence. Large-scale drawings, found and reused objects, and videos of fractured visual and aural static create an immersive installation reflecting a world often ignored and rarely portrayed. Roosters wielding weapons perform acts of violence, fueled by a culture of hyper-machismo. The after effects are visible in beaten and bruised faces and in panoramas littered with body parts. The poor and abused appear in the guise of faceless hair-dos, flea-bitten dogs, and faces hardened by what their eyes have been forced to see. The drawings are downtrodden as well, bleached in the sun and left behind as litter. Yet they are beautifully rendered in a language of old cartoons, cultural stereotypes and images of the old-time west. Stained with coffee, and drawn in crayon, Bic pen and acrylic the work explores the depth of human cruelty and compassion.
“Tranquilandia” is a place where “in every exuberant burst of joyfulness there is heard an undertone of terror.”
The public and members of the Beaver community are invited to a reception for the artist at the Nancy Lincoln Gallery on Thursday, April 12 from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Image: “On My Last Nerve” Mixed Media, 2011, Courtesy Raul Gonzalez III and Carrol and Sons