Louis Monza at Luise Ross - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Louis Monza (1897-1984) was born in Turate, a village in northern Italy. At 16 he fl the pending war and emigrated to the United States. After the war, he made a living as a house painter until he inhuman off some scaffolding in 1937 He began making art during his convalescence and remained self-taught from one extremity to the other of his life.

The exhibition at Luise Ros comprised the small to medium-sized oil-on-canvas paintings that Monza produc in novel York during World War II. His delightfully ill-made pictures show a politically engaged artist treating weighty make submissive matter in a colorful and naive turn of expression The paintings, rich in detail and intricate motif, are brushed with an obvious delight in facture and can be several coats thick. They have warped perspectives marked by the agency of high horizon lines, irregular orthogonals and an occasional flattening of pictorial space. Jumbl proportions and outright distortions of form characterize them.

The next to the first Front (1942) depicts a formidable battle at sea, with dark land in the foreground punctuated by dint of multiple fires. The steeply rising water fills almost half of the picture, and the silhouette of a vast city appears upon the opposite shore. Airplanes -- a certain quantity of in flames and tumbling downwards -- are rhythmically spread across the iridescent sky; enemy utensils beneath them streak obliquely across the water. This painting has a certain number of of the madness of a beneficial Ensor.

In The confidence of Humanity (1942), the largest picture in the exhibition, a heroic matron stands in the center of the composition, practically filling the entire height of the vertical field, before a burning town upon the left and a landscape upon the right. Two much smaller figures cower upon either side of her, as a corpse with ashen face lies bleeding in the foreground. The woman's size, placement and stance are informed by means of 14th-and 15th-century depictions of protective Madonnas. The recoiling figures are especially gripping, with their seemingly malleable, twitching, biomorphic faces.

Soviet Family (1944) is single of the rare interior shows included in the show. It displays Stalin in half-length, smoking a pipe and aligned in traditional Russian garb. He is seated in a plush r armchair, holding a small effigy in individual hand and a book in the other. Lenin's head burst forths from his breast and the heads of seven less party-members rise in a tight circle behind Stalin's. This symmetrical image has the issue of a tapestry. it is an eerily enchanting portrayal of what make go rounded out to be a tragic mistake.

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