Smile that explodes Painting

Ottawa based Anthony Tremmaglia is an artist and educator. Inspired by the complexities of the everyday human experience, Tremmaglia combines paint, charcoal in multi-layered works that underscore our conflicting desires to both assimilate and break free. Tremmaglia was born in 1976 and graduated from Sheridan College in Toronto in 2004. In this new work “You To Me” Anthony explores physical and spiritual connections between the heavens, Earth, and the human body. Influenced by rocky landscape regions in China, the artist uses the horizon line and a recurring circle composition to create a central meeting place for body forms that extend from above and below. Spiritual references to how the heavens meet the Earth—and how the body intertwines throughout—suggest that the pursuit of perfection across the male and the female is ultimately something frail, vulnerable, and illusory, much like how the perfect circle can never be achieved. Refugia- Tony Martins In his series, Refugia, Anthony Tremmaglia explores ideas of regeneration, hopefulness, and solace to tell a story of survival. Refugia are bio-environments that support small populations of once-widespread species, spanning millennia as habitats to which elements of life retreat under environmental strain. In the new works, Tremmaglia’s distinctive landscape figurations in paint and charcoal are evolved through a more layered, complex, and intimate rendering process. The artist varies his treatment of intertwining stone to suggest a deeper confluence of land and body and introduces a white chalk that echoes works of the early Renaissance. He infuses bright, rich, contemporary jade and emerald colours to accentuate a previously muted palette. In nature, and in affairs of the human heart, survival often necessitates reinvention in near-continuous states of flux. Be they mediations on perseverance or the nature of change, the works in Refugia reside at the fluid intersection of the organic and the unyielding, at the axis of time and timelessness. ARTIST STATEMENT: My work offers formal and textural qualities that both confound and intrigue, inviting the viewer to upend assumptions, to step closer, and to consider the renderings in new ways. I challenge the conventions of art making in two-dimensional works that appear sculptural, and with hand-rendered forms that may be initially mistaken for photographs or digital manipulation.