Though multimedia artist Carlito Dalceggio hails from Canada, he finds himself incorporating a world view into his work- colorful and frenzied compositions inspired by tribal art motifs, and master painters like Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani and Vincent Van Gogh. His spiritual and symbolic images of things like kites, peacock feathers and masks also recall Mexican popular art, Picasso’s cubism, Rauschenberg’s abstract expressionism, and Matisse’s primitivism.
“Every painting is a key, a window to the inner world: To live a mystic life in the modern world. Eroticism, freedom, seeking for new ways. I paint an imaginary mythology, in a constant research of new forms, new techniques and new medias,” Dalceggio explains in his artist statement. “From the ancient calligraphy, seeking for a new iconography, an alchemic and modern wedding of sacred iconography with vernacular symbols of consumerism, giving new senses to archetypes. It is the deconstruction of the known world to rebuild a free world.”
For Dalceggio, anything can be his canvas: walls, cars, sculptures, type writers, furniture, even entire rooms have been fully immersed in his colorful art. Though he enjoys large-scale projects like his murals, recognizable for his striking use of organic patterns and iconography, the artist has also been commissioned to create work for Cirque Du Soleil and L’oreal. In 1999, he founded CIRCO DE BAKUZA, a group of artists he describes as “a laboratory of existence based on the alchemic fusion of contemporary art and other arts and culture.”
He believes that a work of art “lives alone, and it is whatever people make out of it.” For instance, a chair covered in art develops an immediate connection for the sitter, who can touch and experience it differently than someone who is looking at a painting. With this notion in mind, Dalceggio spares not an inch of space for his exhibition “I Do Not Scream For An Audience, I Shout At The Holy”, debuting tonight at Celaya Brothers Gallery in Mexico City. “I paint the images we should dream of at night, before we were contaminated by modern life. My art is a pure intuitive and spontaneous way of expression. The desire to paint all objects of the daily life is to bring art to a higher level, in a constant interaction with our daily life; to bring beauty at all moments, to uplift the human existence,” he says.
This Thursday, 
In what he calls “hyperbaroque” sculptures, 
Opening on May 2, “Degeneration/Regeneration" features the paintings of