MIDDLE ROCOCO (1975-early 1980)

Left Behind For Cythera, of 1975, shows a psychological twist on Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera (L'Embarquement pour l'Île de Cythère, 1717, Louvre, Paris) and is profoundly introspective. It is unfortunate that such insight was so often subordinated to mere decorative effect in Collazo's Rococo paintings, a weakness that remained until 1984.

18th Century Abstract, another strong work, contains an Abstract Expressionist cherub and a collage of eighteenth century French figures reminiscent of those in The Best from Vogue and Palace Theater of the Early Rococo series.

Blond Bronx also demonstrates Collazo's tendency to Abstract Expressionism; while later paintings, such as Fish Lips and Bellezzata Calmata, although expressionist in feeling, became hard-edged. Many works of this period have the solitary figure recurrent in Collazo's ouevre and the "endless" rooms, originally seen in the Early Rococo.

Acker-Gherardino comments on individual paintings in the artist's 1980 exhibition, some as early as 1975:

"Here, with an exuberance of line, an immersion in color, a fascination in creating high-ceilinged, endless rooms for his personages to move around in, Collazo follows wherever his fantasies and abundant talent lead him. He means to charm, to give pleasure. Indeed, this is an art of enjoyment, pure and simple; so that, with Fellini, he might well say: 'Life is a holiday, let us enjoy it together'....

[In Bellezzata Calmata], we see an extravagantly beribboned and scarved creature in a tiny, enigmatic mask, poised at the edge of a lake, which dissolves into clouds and mist with the ever-present floor planks and with perspective lines surrounding her in a prismatic space....

But it remains for a master adequately to describe the atmosphere of a Collazo work. As though looking forward over the decades and singling out the painting of a large, blue toucan, a lady and the ghost of a Giotto village [Reality Being Too Thorny for My Great Being]; Arthur Rimbaud wrote in his poem Bottom:

'Reality being too thorny for my great personality -- I found myself at my lady's, an enormous gray-blue bird soaring toward the moldings of the ceiling and trailing my wings through the shadows of the evening.'"3

The Rococo Works of Raphael Collazo: Note

3 Ernest Acker-Gherardino, statement, Raphael Collazo, New York, 1980, for the exhibition Ralph Collazo Paintings and Drawings, Victor Parker Gallery, New York, March 6-March 31, 1980, curated by Acker-Gherardino.