No Mercy
Tony Romano
November 12 to December 17, 2022
Galerie Nicolas Robert Toronto is pleased to present No Mercy, a solo exhibition by Ontario-based artist Tony Romano. As is customary to his practice, Romano has created these works by undergoing a process of collecting, altering, and fabricating, in order to merge the familiar with the absurd. Having outgrown their use value as seats for the middle-class colonial-style country home, a series of discarded chairs are presented underside-up, rescued so that they may function anew, to overturn conventions of sexuality, family, morality, and perfection.
The imagery on these chairs takes its inspiration from a curious medieval practice of carving the underside of the Misericord, a wooden ledge attached to the tops of folded church seats meant to alleviate the strain of standing for long periods of prayer. It was the apprentices to the carpenters who were charged with the task of adding ornament to this area, and the resulting images tended to be of a secular or pagan nature, rooted in fairy tales and ghost stories, in direct opposition to traditional religious iconography and sometimes taking the form of vulgar and explicit sexual acts. In line with this subversive pushback against the sin-obsessed rituals of the Catholic church, these chairs appear to us with their legs in the air, rendered vulnerable and pathetically provocative. With a hint of humour and a twisted take on the uncanny nature of organized religion, No Mercy touches on the hidden fantasies and dark thoughts that are bound to arise from within an organized expectation of personal devotion.
Tony Romano obtained a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. Romano has shown his work extensively internationally including exhibitions in Canada, U.S.A, Austria, U.K, and Sweden. His recent solo exhibitions include Night Thoughts at BEERS London, The Branch in the Salzburg Mine at Clint Roenisch Gallery, The Last Act at Articule, Montreal, Onward Future at Oakville Galleries, Notary Moon at MacLaren Art Gallery, as well as group shows such as GTA21 at MOCA Toronto, Villa Toronto project by Raster Gallery, Millennium Magazine at MOMA New York, Hunter and Cook Projects at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening at the Power Plant in Toronto, and The Island and the Cave at White Columns in New York.
