Vincent Tangredi: Fresco Paintings and Sculpture

Patricia Vervoort is an assistant professor of art history at Lakehead
University.

An exhibition of fresco paintings and sculptures by Vincent Tangredi at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre in Guelph, September 28 to November 17, 1985, prompted this small illustrated catalogue. A short introduction by Ingrid Jenkner, Curator of Exhibitions, and a longer essay entitled “An Allegory of the Desiring Body” by Bruce Grenville form the text of the catalogue. One color and six black-and-white illustrations are provided. The catalogue concludes with a short biography, a list of exhibitions, a selected bibliography, and the list of works in the exhibition, four in all, which details media, dates, measurements, and owners. This small catalogue is important for presenting a known artist in a new phase.

Tangredi is an installation artist, and this exhibition indicates his current preoccupation with the St. Francis legend as a form of allegory. As Ingrid Jenkner writes in her introduction, Tangredi’s works provoke questions about the nature of art and particularly his assertion of the primacy of ideas over craftsmanship. These works, produced since 1983, combine Tangredi’s conceptual approach with traditional object making.

Allusions to late medieval religious art are made with the frescoes, in style, subject matter, and media. These elements, Grenville assents in his philosophical essay, explore the themes of loss of Self and the Other. Thus Tangredi’s visual objects are ambiguous in their exploration of the themes of sexuality, mortality, and religion. The essay by Grenville asserts the conceptual nature of the thought behind the visual art and emphasizes that the art works by Tangredi are more complex than mere viewing suggests. In emphasizing the conceptual basis of Tangredi’s art, no mention is made of the obvious traditional aesthetic appeal.

Like all catalogues, this small pamphlet makes a record of the exhibition and increases the bibliography of the artist; but the black-and-white photographs reduce the scale of the works and lack the tactile qualities inherent in the art. Catalogues cannot substitute for the first-hand experience of seeing the art itself.