This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 13, 2011 - Carmon Colangelo's "Eyedeas" at Bruno David Gallery features two dozen of the prolific artist's recent prints that draw on a breathtaking array of sources, media and disciplines. They're startling to look at, full of color and multiple perspectives, written over by text and doodles, the forms exploding and imploding at once.
If it's Colangelo's goal to approximate in these images the vertiginous experience of the technology-enhanced reality of the 21st century, he's more than succeeded; in fact, it appears he's writing his own version of events, one that bears a strong relation to deconstructive projects like architect Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York of 1978 or the psychogeographic maps fashioned by the Situationist International in the 1950s and 1960s.
And while the list of media he employs -- watercolor, ink, graphite, etc. -- suggests perfectly traditional printmaking approaches, these works clearly have digital technology written into their DNA.
To label them accurately, a neologism may be in order: perhaps "Cyborgraphs" would do, suggesting something of their hybridized blend of the manual and the technical, the analog and the digital.
Whatever they're called, they're more evidence that Colangelo, the dean of the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University, isn't letting his administrative duties detract from making prodigious artistic accomplishments.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.