Choosing to use a narrative (story-telling) approach, I have been making expressive paintings...that are derived from my perception of social situations. The characters are set within a tactile environment drawn from my experiences, the origins of which I may not totally understand. I hope the work opens another dimension which will include and prompt the viewer to be part of the communication.  

 

- Tony Naponic, c.1980 

Tony Naponic's exuberant abstract and figurative paintings were first shown in Kansas City, where he lived from 1973 - 84. Nobody had really seen anything like them. They were brash, big and totally confident. Naponic was making Neo-Expressionist artworks before that term was officially coined in the 1980s, and his works were as good, or better than anything being exhibited in that style, anywhere. When he had a solo show at the Zolla-Lieberman Gallery in Chicago in 1980, critic David Elliott wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times "Naponic shows that at 26 he needs lessons from no one."

He handled paint with gusto, often blending pigment, encaustic, enamels, and pastels. But what made Naponic's artwork singularly compelling was his story-telling abilities, his edgy, over-the-top narratives that defy easy explanation.

The subjects of his representational works were mostly drawn from his own life story. They came from his childhood growing up in Adamsburg, Pennsylvania, where his father was a coal miner and his mother a cook at a Howard Johnson restaurant. They embraced his pool - playing abilities and his love of cars. Some of his most inspired paintings and works-on-paper revolved around the crazy antics of customers at the restaurants where he worked. The hardest art-works to decode are his narratives concerning sexuality and relationships, in which conflict, anger and vulnerability often co-exist.

It's not surprising that Naponic was also a prolific writer of short, surrealist narratives. He made hand-carved and painted wooden books, with strange little stories which ARTnews critic Victoria Melcher in 1981 called "scatological tales...straight out of Naponic's funny but alarming vision of life." Black and white drawings, powerfully sketched, often accom-panied his text pieces in catalogues and notebooks.

From 1976 - 1985 Naponic had 6 major one-person shows throughout the Midwest, and his work was included in 14 group exhibitions, including two at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. When he received a National Endowment for the Arts Emerging Artist Grant, he moved to New York in the mid - 80s.

Naponic, who graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1974, was an abstract painter while in school. In New York his paintings and pastels gradually shifted back to painterly abstraction. He often experimented with sandpaper as a base for these works. The glittery surfaces of his later pieces were as flamboyant, in their own way, as his figurative art from the preceding decade.

Tony Naponic died of congestive heart failure in New York at age 49. All of the work in this exhibit has been generously lent by a variety of collectors, many from the Kansas City region.

by Alice Thorson