Art Center Gallery
Visions Fine Art Gallery
“Artist Rob Gonsalves was born in Toronto, Canada in 1959. During his childhood, he developed an interest in drawing from imagination using various media. By age twelve, his awareness of architecture grew as he leaned perspective techniques and began to do his first paintings and renderings of imagined buildings.
After an introduction to Artists Dali and Tanguy, Gonsalves began his first surrealist paintings. The "Magic Realism" approach of Magritte along with the precise perspective illusions of Escher came to be influences in his future work.
In his post college years, Gonsalves worked full time as an architect, also painting trompe l'oeil murals and theatre sets. After an enthusiastic response in 1990 at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, Gonsalves devoted himself to painting full time.
Although Gonsalves' work is often categorized as surrealistic, it differs due to the fact that the images are deliberately planned and result from conscious thought. Ideas are largely generated by the external world and involve recognizable human activities, using carefully planned illusionist devices. Gonsalves injects a sense of magic into realistic scenes. As a result, the term "Magic Realism" describes his work accurately. His work is an attempt to represent human beings desire to believe is the impossible.
Numerous individuals around the world, corporations, embassies, and a United States Senator collect Gonsalves' original work, and limited edition prints. Rob Gonsalves has exhibited at Art Expo New York and Los Angeles, Decor Atlanta and Las Vegas, Fine Art Forum, as well as one-man shows at Discovery Galleries, Ltd., Hudson River Art Gallery, and Kaleidoscope Gallery.”
This biography is from Discovery Galleries.
“I try to keep my work consistent with the style that I’ve developed and keep it fresh so people are interested in me and the work that I do.” - Rob Gonsalves
"I believe that there is real magic in life. Sometimes the experience of it can be dependent on one's point of view. I have come to see that making of art as the search for that point of view where the magic and wonder of life appears not so much as an illusion, but as an essential truth that often gets obscured." - Rob Gonsalves
I could not seem to find an interview with the artist online, so I typed out the following text from a book that I have called the Masters of Deception.
"I believe that there is real magic in life. Sometimes the experience of it can be dependent on one's point of view. I have come to see that making of art as the search for that point of view where the magic and wonder of life appears not so much as an illusion, but as an essential truth that often gets obscured." - Rob Gonsalves
"Magic realism, primarily Latin American literary movement that arose in the 1960s. The term has been attributed to the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who first applied it to Latin-American fiction in 1949. Works of magic realism mingle realistic portrayals of ordinary events and characters with elements of fantasy and myth, creating a rich, frequently disquieting world that is at once familiar and dreamlike."
"Magic Realism." Academic Search Complete. Colombia Electronic Encyclopedia, 1
July 2010. Web. 8 Nov. 2010.
I could not seem to find an interview with the artist online, so I typed out the following text from a book that I have called the Masters of Deception.
"Much of my free time in childhood was spent daydreaming and drawing. Usually the subject would be an imagined place. For me, the greatest joy in drawing came from giving form to something that had previously only existed in my head. Gradually, my drawings came to be influenced by another aspect of my personality, my strong aptitude for mathematics. Buildings became my main subject. By age 12 I learned the rudiments of perspective drawing, aided by the architectural texts I would pore over.
In my teenage years my interests shifted more towards the realms of surrealism, symbolism and fantasy in art, literature, and even music. The emphasis on the subconscious and imagination intrigued me and pointed the way for the first handful of paintings that I was to produce. These images were dreamlike and enigmatic in the manner typical of surrealism. I did not at this point have the confidence to consider painting to be a career path that I could realistically pursue. My painting activities were essentially put on hold as I studied architecture and worked for some years in that business.
Eventually my desire to create images returned, as my work in architecture had not allowed many opportunities to fully exercise my imagination. I made more time for painting, continuing in a surrealist vein, but with new influences, probably largely due to my architecture experience. I had long been fascinated by the techniques that are employed to show the spatial relationship of objects in two-dimensional representations of the world. As I began painting again I felt the need to make the dreamlike, magical occurrences depicted seem more concrete, as if they could be experienced in the physical world. My first introduction to the work of Magritte helped to crystallize for me the direction that my work was to take. His work “The Human Condition” has a magical effect while being at the same time a straightforwardly realistic image. I has wanted to affirm that magical and wondrous experiences are not confined to the realm of dreams or the subconscious, but rather can be derived from our experience and conscious interpretation of the physical world, Magritte’s “magic realism” helped me to see how I could achieve this.
From a technical point of view, my work began to employ various optical illusion devices. At the same time however, I became more focused with regard to what I wanted to express about the subjects that I was depicting. In general, I would say that my work has become primarily a celebration of the wonder of imagination. When one’s imagination is brought to bear on a simple life experience, it can be magical – even transcendent.
Frequently, the desire to express the wonder of imagination is manifested as images depicting children at play. The magical transformation in such images illustrates what is happening in the minds of the characters depicted, who are so absorbed by their activity that what is imagined seems to become real. Often these images will involve the type of illusion device that suggests an impossible (yet convincing) change of scale.
Other sources of inspiration for my images can be found in the various dualities that can be observed in life experience: natural vs. human made, urban vs. rural, light vs. dark, material vs. spiritual, etc. The images that are rooted in these concepts usually employ the device of a metamorphosis from one element to another. However, the techniques of optical illusion in my work are utilized somewhat intuitively. The devices that I use are generated perhaps less scientifically than in the work of artists whose primary concern is the creation of optical illusions for their own sake. For me, the particular subject depicted and its emotional impact is crucial; the illusions are a means to an end and must serve the objectives of the overall conception of the image."
Seckel, Al. Masters Of Deception - Escher, Dali & the Artists of Optical
Illusion. New York, New York: Sterling Publishing, 2004. Print.
I was introduced to Rob Gonsalves' work several years ago when I received his Master of Illusion wall calendar in either 2007 or 2008. I transformed his monthly images into wall art, now displayed in my apartment. I admire his dream-like imagery that flows as if it were an actual scene. His work with optical illusion allows the viewer to be swept off into his created world, full of realist magic. He works in such a way that does not allow just the illusion to take over, but to allow the illusion transform into a realistic world for his characters and viewers alike. As far as relating to my artistic practice, I admire his combination of surrealism with realism, creating dreams, magic, and events that seem to be real life. I unfortunately cannot draw to save my life, so I am at a disadvantage there, yet the world of photoshop can do many things...
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