Pyrographic artist Zachary Aronson isn’t burning down the house – he’s burning wood panels into fine art by using a blowtorch as a paintbrush.
Aronson’s open-flame pyrography is in a grand display at the Ernie Wolfe Gallery through July 21. With this new show, Totem, he gives us larger than life portraits that make strong use of wood grains with his emblazoned images.
He notes “My current work is comprised of large portraits burnt into planks of wood. I look at my artistic practice as collaboration with nature, using the traditionally destructive element of fire to breathe new life into an organic material.”
Watching Aronson work – swift, sure, skilled, and deeply, literally in touch with his medium, is a gift. The artist often perform live at art and private events, and in doing so, viewers can literally see animate life appearing within the inanimate surface of the wood. He’s a conjurer as well as an artist.
Aronson uses the grains and imperfections in each wood panel within his work, paying tribute to the textures and the beauty of the natural medium, as well as to the people whose visages he frees from within it.
He describes his work as being “about humanity, individuality and depth of feeling,” and that is certainly intrinsic to his work.
The large-scale pieces here are almost anthemic, visually. They’re gorgeous, alive portraits, and they are also a kind of collective and individual homage to the spirit that inhabits each face, each eye.
Evocative and warm, the works emerge, or seem to be born, from the grain of the wood; they are made more beautiful because of it.
Aronson says “Totem include dozens of original pyrographs including an immersive 750-square-foot maze consisting of forty 8-foot tall redwood portraits. Additional pyrographs on redwood, birch, pine, sequoia and other various woods are displayed on the gallery walls.”
There is a sense of reverence almost immediately upon entering the well-curated gallery space. As one walks through the maze of works, it is striking that the vastness and perfection of Aronson’s portraiture feels like a living memorial, a tribute – to the people whose images he’s painted with fire, to the entities of wood and fire themselves, to a raw and exciting intertwining of medium, method, and craft.
“I think artistic practice is a collaboration with nature, instilling new purpose and identity in my medium by transforming wood to ash in the primal fusion of fire and earth,” Aronson asserts.
