Robert Alonzi

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 w...