Tracing Threads Through Time: The Artwork of William C. Maggio

William C. Maggio is a lifelong resident of Western New York. As an artist, educator and musician, his creative influence is a thread that can be traced through time, connecting generations of people. His artwork is a visual journey inward towards the core of the human soul.

This is the first comprehensive exhibition to feature works in all stages of Maggio's career. Early works combine representational themes with the textured facades of buildings, decayed, vandalized and showing the signs of the passage of time. Many works from this period evoke the asphaltum used in the intaglio process to mask the etchers plate before it is submerged in a caustic bath.

Works from the period that followed retain some of the representational figurative elements of the early work. Now fragmented and integrated with the imagined elements of floor patterns, chalkboards and coiled thread, the focus on surfaces is still central. Important works from this period include fragments of old advertising billboards that the artist retrieved himself.

Later works are notable for their turn to the fully abstract, and an increase in scale, providing viewers with a breathtaking expanse of nuance and detail. Of this work, Maggio says:

Light and dark, heavily textured, layered, scarred and sculptural surfaces present an imposing, reverberating, pulsating, and rhythmic Presence that triggers a chain of metaphoric associations. The aura is both mystical and spiritual. Viewing encourages a meditative, prayerful state of mind.

Using a limited palette of white and black tones, his recent techniques evoke emotion and response, building layer upon layer of paint, only to scrape it away to reveal organic designs within. The threads that tie his life’s work together are his remarkable use of texture, and an artistic practice grounded in a constant state of searching and refinement - so much so, he says, that he feels he only recently reached the status of a true artist.