Press
Dominick Di Meo’s ghostly surrealism stands apart
[By Alan G. Artner, Tribune Art Critic. Published June 13, 2008]
It has been a long time since Dominick Di Meo had a solo exhibition in Chicago, and the one now at the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery makes the absence inexplicable. Both in paintings and reliefs, Di Meo’s is strong, personal work that formally and philosophically surpasses much of the celebrated art by the generation that followed his.
A native of Niagara Falls, N.Y., he came to maturity in the late 1940s, just a few years before attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was associated with the surrealism of the “Monster Roster” of local painters, and in the works on view (1947-1974) we see him looking to some of their sources, particularly Joan Miro and early Jean Dubuffet. But while his overriding vision was inward it came together with existential concerns and a spirit of experimentation that made his work stand apart from most other Chicagoans of the period.
To call him a poet fixed on death would not be amiss, insofar as perforated beads resembling skulls appear in his work again and again. But his vocabulary of forms went beyond that, including such commonplace objects as spoons and forks, which he gave a ghostly, almost hallucinatory radiance. And his figures in moonstruck landscapes are something else again. So, in these works, Di Meo shows he was not just an artist of death’s heads and funerary rituals. One of the largest collages on view shows him, in fact, as an equally good observer of contemporary fashion.
The single free-standing sculpture leaves me cold. But the exhibition has a number of fine small reliefs and a couple of landscapes that are among the more memorable works of the history of contemporary art in Chicago.