STEPHEN ROMANO GALLERY

romanostephen@gmail.com

www.romanoart.com

STEPHEN ROMANO is pleased to announce that after being absent from the Outsider Art Fair for several years, he will return to exhibit the works of Charles A.A. Dellschau (1830 - 1923), whom he has since produced a major book on (in association with Marquand books and DAP) with the final essay published by the late THOMAS MCEVILLEY, William A. Blayney, Darcilio Lima, William Mortensen, Erna Kd, Cendrine Rovini, Vincent Castiglia, Orryelle Defenestrate, Kim Bo Yung, Damian Michaels, Lori Field, Anonymous esoteric folk and vintage photography.

CHARLES A.A. DELLSCHAU (1830 - 1923)

Produced by butcher Charles Dellschau (1830–1923) after his retirement in 1899, the works contained "newspaper clippings, he called them 'press blooms', of early attempts at flight overlapped with his own fantastic drawings of airships of all kind. Powered by a secret formula he cryptically referred to as 'NB Gas' or 'Suppa' — the 'aeros' (as Dellschau called them) were steampunk like contraptions with multiple propellers, wheels, viewing decks and secret compartments. Though highly personal, autobiographical (perhaps!), and idiosyncratic, these artworks could cross-pollinate with the fiction of Jules Verne, Willy Wonka and the Wizard of Oz. The works were completed in a furiously creative period from 1899 to 1923, when air travel was still looked at by most people as almost magical." Featured image is reproduced from Charles Dellschau, the first monograph ever published on the artist.

"Dellschau is widely acknowledged as an Outsider Art Master in the same league with Wolfli, Darger and Ramirez"

Tom Patterson, Raw Vision Magazine Summer 2013

Early-20th-Century Drawings of Fanciful Flying Machines

A. FIORELLO (dates unknown)

Also being exhibited for the first time ever at the Outsider Art Fair will be the political works of virtually anonymous artist A. Fiolrello (dates unknown), whom nothing is known about. Fiorello's works were previously exhibited at the Metro Show and the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn. A. Fiorello is said to have exhibited these on the street of New York in the 1970's and early 1980's. Without finding any patrons or collectors, he eventually abandoned the works themselves on the doorstep of the American Communist Party's headquarters. They didn't know what to do with them, so they donated them to a local goodwill store, who eventually sold them to an antiques and oddities dealer, who kept them under wraps in his store on 32nd street. Eventually, the late dealer in ephemera Elie Buck discovered them and acquired them. Upon his passing in 2015, they were passed down to Stephen Romano, who has been perpetuating them ever since.

the Art of A. FIORILLO – The Odyssey of the Forces of Death .

WILLIAM H. MORTENSEN (1897 - 1965)

Also featured in Stephen Romano Gallery's booth,and also for the first time ever at the Outsider Art Fair will be the vintage manipulated photographs of William H. Mortensen (1897 - 1965).

excepts from "William Mortensen: Photographic Master at the Monster’s Ball"

Chris Campion

"Ansel Adams called him ‘the Antichrist’ and wanted him written out of history. But William Mortensen’s grotesque photographs of death, nudity and torture and are now having their day..

..Mortensen’s methods often made it hard to distinguish whether the results were photographs or not. He used traditional printmaking techniques, such as bromoiling, and developed many of his own. He would create composite images, scratch, scrape and draw on his prints, then apply a texture that made them look like etchings, thereby disguising his manipulations. Consequently, every print was unique. Ultimately, Mortensen’s aim was to create something that, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be a photograph, yet portrayed scenes so fantastic they caused wonder and astonishment in the viewer.

..His love of the fantastic and the grotesque was, then, partly an outward expression of his love to shock, but it had another purpose: by giving form to such emotions as fear and hatred, Mortensen, a Christian Scientist, believed “we are enabled to lessen their power over us”. He added: “When the world of the grotesque is known and appreciated, the real world becomes vastly more significant.”

..It was these kinds of ideas that so angered Adams and his Group f/64 brethren devoted to photography that depicted a pure, unmediated reality. This began a spirited debate with Mortensen within the pages of the magazine that became ever more vitriolic. However, Adams did not stop there, suggesting in a personal letter to Mortensen that he “negotiate oblivion”. When fellow photographer Edward Weston wrote telling of his excitement at photographing a “fresh corpse”, Adams replied: “My only regret is that the identity of said corpse is not our Laguna Beach colleague.”

..The critics Beaumont Newhall and his wife Nancy held the same view: Beaumont consciously excluded Mortensen from his grandiosely titled 1949 book The History of Photography, From 1839 to the Present Day. Their distaste would not even allow them to acknowledge Mortensen’s mastery of his craft. Ultimately though, for all the griping of Adams and f/64, it turns out that Mortensen was the true modernist all along, not them. For today, we are surrounded by images of the fantastic and unreal.

William Mortensen "The Initiation of a Young Witch" c. 1924 Manipulated photograph

WILLIAM BLAYNEY (1917 - 1986)

William A. Blayney was born in Western Pennsylvania at Claysville on December 21, 1918. He had a natural talent for drawing at a grade school and drew cartoon-like figures and sayings on bomber planes while serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Honorably discharged in 1945, Blayney drove heavy equipment vehicles and ran an auto body and engine repair shop.

William A. Blayney: Pagan Roman KingdomIn the late 1950's, Blayney became increasingly interested in studying the Bible and attended Bible meetings conducted by local TV evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman. Blayney suddenly started to paint in 1957, at the same time that he became immersed in the Bible. He felt he had a mission to preach, he began to paint the intense religious works which express his concern with the decline of morals in the world. His paintings express the redemptive power of God as revealed by the Hebrew prophet Daniel while held captive in Babylon in the Old Testament and of the Holy Trinity in the New Testament's book of Revelations. He was ordained in 1969 in the Pentecostal Ministry by the laying on of hands. When Blayney died in 1985.

DARCILIO LIMA (1944 - 1991)

Excerpted from

Meet Darcilio Lima, The Obscure Brazilian Artist Who Helped Shape Surrealism

by Priscilla Frank

Darcilio Lima had his first art show at 10 years old. He was a crucial player in Rio’s hedonistic underground art scene in the 1960s. He spent a significant period of time in the 1970s in Paris, sleeping in a graveyard. Like any legit surrealist, he was friends with Salvador Dali. And, yet, the Brazilian artist’s name remains widely unknown, despite the captivatingly fine lines and hypnotically twisted figures that ooze forth from the darkest depths of his subconscious.

Lima was born in an impoverished coastal town in Brazil in 1944. In his mid-twenties, he was living the life you’d imagine for a bohemian surrealist, experimenting with drugs, sexuality and identity, while pursuing a deeper spiritual knowledge. The overwhelming ferocity of it all led to a nervous breakdown, at which time Lima took up in an outpatient facility for disturbed creatives, where his art truly reached new, very strange heights.

In the ‘70s, Lima finally garnered international attention, when — seemingly out of nowhere — he disappeared from the art world completely. “Years later, a journalist who was doing a story on him found him in his northern costal birthplace,” Stephen Romano Gallery explained in a statement, “rumored to be haunted by a giant underground serpent, disheveled and unkept, writing his ramblings on the walls of a dirt-floored back room of a church, living off the generosity of the community.”

Although Lima attempted to destroy all of his works shortly after being rediscovered, many survived. The artist died in 1994 after a freak accident, but his art lives on.

The art of Darcilio Lima will be exhibited at the Reine Sophia Museum in Madrid in April 2017 and at the Metropolitain Museum of Art in New York in September 2017, courtesy of Stephen Romano Gallery.