Art and Resistance: Lawrence Calcagno at Amar Gallery

Lawrence Calgaro's vibrating, energetic work: Photo credit Lawrence Calcagno Estate, Courtesy Amar Gallery

By RACHEL BENHAM November 11, 2024

I step into the subterranean sanctuary of Fitzrovia's Amar Gallery just as the weak October sun finally burns off London’s damp morning haze. The gallery is alive, not just with the luminous work of Lawrence Calcagno, but with the twisting, leaping bodies of the dancers the gallery’s founder Amar Singh has invited to compose a performance in this space. They mingle their movements with the light that radiates from Calcagno’s paintings and fill the air so often with laughter. The gallery has the feel of a workshop, snapped out of passivity and throbbing with movement that echoes the animated strokes of Calcagno’s work. Far from a static space in which art exists only to be looked at, Amar Gallery is all energy, all life, all celebration.

Celebration is a fitting term for a gallery that devotes its space to significant yet overlooked artists whose stories have often been muted by voices more powerful than theirs. Gaining recent attention with the Dora Maar collection and reaffirming her status as a key figure in photography and surrealism, Singh now returns with Lawrence Calcagno’s vibrating, textured paintings.

Constellations of the Inner Eye IV 1977: Photo credit Lawrence Calcagno Estate, Courtesy Amar Gallery

Singh speaks of Calcagno’s work with reverence, narrating the history and context of each painting as we move through the gallery and inviting me to witness the fine detail and depth held in just one inch of Calcagno’s layered, textured canvases. There is nothing stagnant, nothing one-dimensional in the way the paint rests here in contours and peaks, and spending time in front of each canvas, one finds ghosts of shapes in creamy skies and traces of whispers that speak of what lies beneath. With paint layered this way, Calcagno is making a choice to both reveal and conceal, and this is fitting for an artist who conducted same-sex relationships in a time when it was still a crime and much of oneself had to be kept hidden in order to survive.

Singh, too, has made choices here, consciously placing Calcagno’s work in context. The gallery is rich with supplementary photography of the artist and notes that guide the viewer to understand the conditions Calcagno operated within, working to educate as well as to display. Singh tells me of Calcagno’s relationship with modernist painter Beauford Delaney, highlighting the particular malice 1950’s American society would have heaped upon the pair: an interracial, homosexual couple in an environment deeply hostile to both blackness and gayness.

Earth Legend V 1978: Photo credit Lawrence Calcagno Estate, Courtesy Amar Gallery

To live under this kind of threat, to be placed inside these kinds of social containers, these political constraints, could easily lead to art that speaks only, and quite reasonably, of claustrophobia and fear, but what is so magnetic about Calcagno’s abstract use of paint is the rhythmic glee and bare energy of existence that repeatedly beams itself from his work. As a student of Mark Rothko, the traces of his tutor’s hand are undeniably present in this exhibition, but the result is lineage rather than mimicry, development rather than inertia, and while Rothko’s work can often feel deafening, Calcagno’s is more likely to sing. It is all spirit and space: expansive pale stretches slashed through with the clashing tension of colour and line.

Singh stops in front of a blown up black and white photograph of Calcagno in the Mediterranean Sea and points out James Baldwin beside him. The men look happy, bodies relaxed in the shape of vacation, and Singh tells me how Europe became a retreat for both men, a place where their passions, their identities, their existence, was less regulated.

The exhibition contains a mixture of Calcagno's work along with personal photography: Photo credit Aya Saleh, Courtesy Amar Gallery

Belonging to the particular era of Abstract Expressionism, Calcagno’s work is now part of art’s heritage, its history. Art critic Harold Rosenburg contrasts the qualities of this form with earlier movements, expressing this representational shift as work containing “not a picture but an event”. Reading Calcagno’s work this way returns us to the remarkable recognition of how his events occur not as a riot of fury or aggression against the conditions within which he must exist, but as an affirmation, an assertion, a stamp of multidimensional being shaped by far more than what society willed him to be reduced to. In this sense, Calcagno’s noisy work is a refusal of the prison, literal or metaphorical, that the impoverished ideology of homophobia would have held him in. Much as his friend James Baldwin uses his writing to assert his own rich identity over and above the limitations racism would also have had him known by, Calcagno’s events exceed and by consequence make him unavailable for degradation.

Understood this way, Calcagno’s art is aesthetic and activism, which makes sense in a gallery directed by Singh, whose background spans both the art world and human rights advocacy, and who pushes for the representation of silenced and subaltern individuals as much as he does for artists, amplifying the cries of those in India caught in conversion therapy and human trafficking. But for a man who comfortably operates in two such significant spaces, Singh is softly modest when pressed to discuss his work as an activist, speaking more readily of his family’s involvement and preferring little of the spotlight for this to rest on him.

Amar Singh's work spans both art and activism: Photo credit Amar Gallery

Regardless of this modesty, the cause of the subaltern continues to motivate and drive Singh, and he speaks of other projects, further methods to create representation through the medium of culture, outlining ideas for an expansion of his work in film as an additional way to tell stories of those who cannot otherwise speak, and to draw our eyes towards that which is too easy to ignore.

In one sense, this ambition speaks to a desire in Singh to not simply span the spheres of activism and art, but to reach across time, salvaging work that so easily could have been lost or left behind, while also, through the creation of new events, constructing a kind of present day insurance that promises, to some degree, that we are aware of what, and who, is still sacrificed at the feet of injustice.  WM