Robert J. Cuneo is a professor of Fine Arts, MFA alumnus of Yale School of Art, who taught at the University of Bridgeport from 1969 to 1991. He is also an artist learned in the magical and alchemical sciences as well as the social history of the arts and literary culture. He is an affable artist willing to discuss his store of knowledge in non-scientific language and a marvelous visual vocabulary of historical images and archetypal icons. In this wild array of miniature allegories, one can touch upon the emotive or mystic principle portrayed in gouache colors, intensified with acrylic spray and gloss varnish, within each goldleaf frame -- Each one a window into a delightful dreamworld.
"Miniature paintings are like a tiny peep-hole in a high wall," he says. "Standing up close to one, you may peer through and see another world on the other side." In the style of the Magic Symbolists, each of Cuneo’s miniatures is an original illuminated vision into an enchanted domain wherein his Guardian Muse is invoked in the poetic imagination of subtlety, becoming a tangible and real being. "This Muse reveals the image to me in some detail, which intensifies under the strokes of my brush, the delineation of the pencil, and the shades of the underdrawing, similar to a 17th century European alchemical illustration."
"As we no longer live in a world where paintings and drawings speak with any accepted grammar, I cannot expect that my visual language can have any universal impact. What you see here through the peep-hole of my miniatures is what I myself saw when I painted. I am a mere illustrator in the employment of my Muse..."
Gallery Curator : Johnes
Ruta (203) 387-4933
azothgallery@comcast.net
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