Alfonso Volo (b. 1954)

Alfonso Volo, who is known for his surreal paintings, sculptures, crocheted works, and altered found objects, wrote: “Bow-Wow is part of a body of artwork PETS ARE US, and is in a group of large acrylic paintings [titled] POODLE PAINTINGS.” For many years, Volo has used unstretched canvas in producing large-scale acrylic paintings, which contributes to the overall sense of informality in his painterly, cartoon-like style. In attempting to decipher meaning from the seemingly arcane juxtaposition of imaginary creatures and bizarre objects, one must become familiar with Volo’s mysterious “vocabulary,” an on-going collection of subjects and symbols with which he ultimately questions the relationship between humans and all others in the animal kingdom.

Volo is also interested in how people prefer artifice and imaginary anthropomorphosis to reality, how we create hierarchies in the animal realm, and how we manipulate creatures that have no power to resist their abuse. Bow-Wow appears to call into question the unnatural stylized grooming that poodles endure to satisfy human expectations of a weird aesthetic beauty, as this gentrified two-headed dog, which has broken free from its chain of captivity, cannot detach itself from its wild animal identity, sans pompoms, in its attraction to the lure of a home with attached dog bone offered as bait by an unknown higher power. From a mixed metaphor, the blue clouds, reminiscent of forms in Chinese landscape paintings, also resemble floating brains in this dark, hellish sea.

Different bodies of Volo’s work were exhibited in Beyond/In Western New York 2005 in both the Burchfield-Penney Art Center and at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. We showed mixed media objects and paintings from “Are These Not Animals?,” “Post-plaque Abstentions,” “Belated Yarns,” “O Mighty Mouse!,” “Plush and Furry,” “Belated Yarns,” “Crocheted Extensions,” and “Crocheted Rhizomes.”  In 1995, a solo, “dual site exhibition” of his work was presented at the UB Art Gallery and Big Orbit Gallery, which included many large, unstretched canvas paintings.