Carmen Cicero has made art since he was a child and at 99 is still doing so.
The Berta Walker Gallery is currently featuring some of his prolific watercolors in “Tales of Intrigue,” an exhibition running through July 20, which accompanies his book: “Carmen Cicero, Watercolors and Drawings, Tales of Danger, Intrigue and Humor.” (The book, by David Ebony, and “The Art of Carmen Cicero,” will be available at the Provincetown gallery.)
Walker recently talked of rediscovering Cicero, promoting him at the Graham Modern Gallery in New York City where he received three important reviews that launched him on his current trajectory as an artist collected by virtually every important museum in the country including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney and the Guggenheim. (Simultaneously to showcasing Carmen’s work, Walker is featuring Deb Mell and Danielle Mailer who create their own symbolism, iconography and fantasy in multimedia work, and Lucy Clark whose oils seem as if water itself took shape to investigate itself.)
Cicero’s watercolors and drawings depict the strangeness of the human condition and the masks that we wear woven through with themes of injustice, subtle lust and chaos, as well as joy. Often cartoonish and both dream-like and humorously Noir, as exemplified by “The Serpent,” a night scene of a trench coated man followed by a snake on a road under the moon, or by “Castle Hill Road,” showing a mysterious darkened house at sunset with a ghost of a man watching it from across the street, vignettes take place within an unknowable and awesome nature and universe.
A second exhibition of Cicero’s work, “Drawings and Watercolors: Tales of Intrigue, Danger and Humor,” will be on view at the Cape Cod Museum of Art from July 3 through October 5.
Artscope Magazine’s Cape Cod correspondent, Lee Roscoe, recently spoke with Cicero in advance of his summer exhibitions. The conversation was edited for clarity.
LEE ROSCOE (ARTSCOPE): You’ve painted in acrylic, watercolor, drawn with ink, pencil and paint in black and white, structured collages. Which medium do you prefer?
CARMEN CICERO: I think the answer is I choose what I feel like doing at the moment.