An Article About the Artist By The Montreal Gazette
Artist Richard Rossetto, who recently lost a tooth to one of his martial arts students, sits in front of some of his work at the Visual Voice Gallery.Photograph by: PIERRE OBENDRAUF THE GAZETTE,
Richard Rossetto is fighting to keep living the life of an artist. Months behind on his rent, without a telephone or power, he’s just lost a front tooth to his student in the martial arts discipline of senshido.
But he has a few things going for him: a school-age daughter, an earnest, disarming openness -and the first solo show of his art career. He also gives art tours, and I’ve hired him for his asking price of $40 for what turns out to be four hours of gallery hopping. At every stop, gallery directors and others respond affectionately to this artist who quotes the film fighter Rocky Balboa: “It ain’t about how hard you hit. … It’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward.”
And Rossetto is moving forward. An exhibition of his drawings opened Thursday at the Visual Voice Gallery in the Belgo Building. They are stream-ofconsciousness “automatic” ink drawings based on words and cross hatchings, into which he intervenes, finding and developing evocative forms.
But today he is my tour guide. We bike from Peel St. to Greene Ave. in Bixi-less Westmount, so as we walk from the Bixi dock outside the Atwater metro, he talks of growing up as an army brat and singing in a hard-core punk-rock band in Edmonton at 16. He was drawn into art through Van Gogh and Calgary-born Attila Richard Lukacs’s paintings of skinheads, and studied at the Alberta College of Art and Design.
He lived on the edge, became emotionally ravaged and suicidal, but says he never became homeless or a drug addict. “My (first) goal was to be a starving artist,” he recounted. “I did that. And it sucks.” But he fought back, developing a mental toughness through positive thinking. He trained in martial arts, repeating these words in his head: “In the gym, I fight to win. In the street, I fight to survive.” During our time together, he spoke often about giving and receiving respect and how to survive. He turned his punk attitude inside out: “I decided to be polite to everybody.”
At the Galerie d’Este, he tells gallery owner Mark Liebner that he was “in full rocker regalia” on his first visit to his gallery, yet was warmly received. “You were very kind, and your art was very exciting,” Rossetto tells him.
Liebner discusses his fall shows of the colour-focused photographs, videos and books (one of them is The Girl Who Loved the Lavender Fairy) of Sarindar Dhaliwal, opening Sept. 25 and of Angela Grossmann, whose show of mixed media collages opens Nov. 6, (and who shared a studio in mid-1980s Vancouver with Luckacs).
We visit Galerie de Bellefeuille, a few steps up the street, which Rossetto likes because it is an “art house” where paintings are stacked like in a record store and “you can smell the oil paint.”
I want to visit Galerie Division across the street, but Rossetto isn’t interested – and he’s the tour guide. But, he assures me as we bike down de Maisonneuve Blvd., he does adjust the tour to suit his client. “If they want a beer, we’ll go where we can get beer brewed in Montreal, like at the Irish Embassy. Everything about my tours is local,” he says.
At the Belgo Building, we head to Maison Kasini, where the theme is “art for the people” and gallery manager Christopher Byrne sells framed prints for as little as $45.
At Projex MTL Galerie, Paul Brunet’s exhibition of cartoonish paintings is in its last week. In an image of a male skeleton posing happily with a flesh-and-blood woman and child, Rossetto sees apocalyptic visions, but that “humanity will continue.” Gallery director Andre Larouche-Joncas sees “John Paul Sartre translated into pop art.”
On to Galerie Push, one of the places “where local artists go to get their juice,” Rossetto says, then a knock on the door at Art 45, where Chloe Roubert is setting up a show that juxtaposes images from Jon Rafman’s contemporary Google Street View series with Gabor Szilasi’s street scenes dating from the 1950s. The idea is to “compare artistic approaches to public and private space in different periods,” she says.
Finally, it’s the Musee d’art contemporain, where Rossetto has arranged with media relations officer Danielle Legentil to finish our tour with a drink. It’s the museum’s first Nocturne of the season, where on the first Friday of each month, the museum stays open until 9 p.m., offering gallery access, bar service, live music and videos.
Later, Rossetto emails me a clarification about the lack of power in his apartment: “My daughter’s friends help us out with a plug from their outside electrical box. With that I have the bare essentials: my Sony PlayStation3, my TV and a lamp.”
Inner Dialogue, the drawings of Richard Rossetto, continues at the Visual Voice Gallery, 372 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 421, until Oct. 2. For more information, go to visualvoicegallery. com/. To see images of Rossetto’s drawings, go to rossettoink. com/about/ and link to the Saatchi Online gallery.
jpohl@montrealgazette.com
© Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
A Letter of Reference for artist tours and another
for information about tours contact rossettoink @gmail.com
SPECIAL thanks To Mr. John Pohl who without his good and genuine nature I may not have been so open.
