Wild Mickey Painting

Robert Alonzi was born in 1953 to Italian parents in Soumagne, Belgium. He grew up in the mining city Hevre between Liege and Verviers. Dismissed early as a slow pupil he was often placed at the back of the classroom where the impatient teacher wouldn’t have to deal with him. Alonzi was ashamed to be isolated at the back of the room and withdrew into himself, reluctant to engage with the class around him. This isolation and withdrawal may have cost him literacy but it nurtured his independent worldview. His view of the world may have been colored by early fear, but with the pencil and paper he was given to occupy himself, he began to record his unique vision. The big, frightening faces of the elderly loom out of his paintings as they would into the face of the fearful child. At 14 he left school to help support the family. Its often noted Alonzi draws rather than writes the items on his grocery list. He went from working on the factory line producing the local Maquee cream cheese for butchering in the slaughterhouse, ‘de la maquee a la decoupe dans un abattoir’ in his own words. The work was tough but the job was secure, the type to be expected for a man who left school that early. Occasionally, for a break, he swapped jobs with a mate; removing the heads of the dead pigs instead of lugging their carcasses on his shoulders and hanging them from the butcher’s hooks. Somehow Alonzi found the time and energy to begin making pictures in secret, away from the eyes of his father who believed the work was a distraction that would jeopardize his position at the abattoir. When Robert was 18 Alonzi senior discovered his son’s art hidden in a room off the kitchen and destroyed all of the pictures, his materials, everything. Undeterred, he continued, teaching himself to paint in secret alongside his slaughterhouse work. Alonzi’s early work is noted for its use of a very limited palette, childhood and pastoral scenes are captured with just red, white, grey and black. The pictures are often at once inviting and unnerving, an effect of the proportions being somewhat slightly off, a menacing facial expression or something mysterious and even sinister about the way the figures collect and arrange themselves in his pictures. The routine of longs days of labor gave Alonzi the work ethic he approaches his paintings with to this day.