BALTIMORE, MD - C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present Sculpting the Ideal, a survey exhibition of the drawings and sculptures of Joseph Sheppard. As a pillar of the Baltimore arts community, Sheppard’s long-standing commitment to the recovery of anatomical form, technique, and draftsmanship across mediums presents viewers with a perspective that masters the authentic essentials of artistic composition.

“Casting images in a dimension without time, by virtue of an apparently classical and lofty, maybe even anachronistic linguistic choice, [represents] a constant feature of Sheppard’s long creative career. On several occasions, critics have spoken about a surprising poetics of realism, of social realism, of a deeply-felt concern for the miseries and grandness of our ties. He too, like the great poet Ungaretti, has been rightly defined as a man of suffering. Instead I would rather insist on the constant [illustrative] process which tends to transform the poetics of his gaze into the poetics of vision...The fact that he is an inexhaustible traveller-observer of space and memory compels him to record heaps of extraordinary images-emotions with the utmost vividness. Witnesses of their times, they surge from inside him to be revealed at last and become stories, protagonists of real experiences, instances of all sorts of human condition, through an increasingly refined, though essentially unchanged process of sculpture and painting that has been going on for over sixty years. The main aim is to represent, in the full original sense: that is, “things, figures or facts of the past becoming parts of the present in the mind’s eye”. Therefore, in all his paintings or sculptures, this narrative visionariness emerges from the instantaneous and dilated (at times even Baroque) effect of a mise-en-scene at the peak of emotional dramatic tension”.

Piestrasanta, July 17, 2009

Giuseppe Cordoni, L’umana condizione

english translation by Francesco Di Muro