Rational Grotesqueries

When O. Louis Guglielmi was young his violinist father broke a fiddle over his head because he would not practice. After this violent baptism, he was separated from music and sent to study for four years at the National Academy of Design. At the end of that time he was 18 and an accomplished draftsman, but he quit Art cold. Says he, "I just couldn't understand what painting was for."

Paintings would be better if more young painters knew their minds so well, but in 1932, after nearly eight hard years of dishwashing and other grim jobs, Guglielmi became aware that "painting could be a means of communication." To Louis Guglielmi this was a solemn discovery, solemnly followed up. Working with the painful slowness of a virtuoso who hates virtuosity, living on the Federal Art Project's $22.77 a week, he has finished in five years 16 paintings which he is willing to show. Last week they were shown at Manhattan's Downtown Gallery in his first one-man exhibition.

Mostly done in oil on gesso (a smooth white ground of chalk mixed with casein glue), Artist Guglielmi's delicately painted panels are calculated and precise symbols of ideas. In Persistent Sea a solid doorway melts into a vast, minutely painted ocean. In Mental Geography a modern angel with bomb fins instead of wings perches on a twisted cable of Brooklyn Bridge, ruined by bombing. In these and other paintings Guglielmi has developed a specifically American variant of Surrealism--grotesqueries dependent on rational rather than irrational meaning.

A good-looking, dark-mustached youn man, Guglielmi has a Latin gaiety and ar outrageous load of self-effacing satire. Last week he was worried lest the gallery lose money on his show, even though Nelson Rockefeller had bought his Persistent Sea for $250. He attributed his love for his hobby, carpentry, to the fragrance of fresh wood, then added sweetly, "or maybe it's the Jesus in me."

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