dexterdelmonte.artwork@gmail.com

About the work

Dexter Delmonte is a Sicilian American installation artist and painter.
Delmonte's work is raw, intuitive, and particularly compelling. Line drawings expose sensual and intimate views of people posturing unaware of interaction around them. In a silent landscape, figures float or ground in seemingly oblivion ambiguities suspended in the moment. Often haunting, pained, and even cryptic, Delmonte's evocative studies are reminiscent of Egon Schiele.
"My work conveys a crossing into introspection where we find the truth of who we are within and recognize that truth in one another. The meaning of Namaste or Sat Nam in the Sikh traditions; the Christ in me sees the Christ in you, or my truth sees your truth. Autobiographical, in a sense, my art mirrors a similar life's path of soul searching, which abruptly ended my work for over 20 years toward a path of focused self-reflection; I began a rigorous discipline and practice into Zen Buddhist Meditation, becoming a Zen monk in 2020. During this time, I began to hear my animal's thoughts and became an international telepathic communicator for animals, using the name Diana. And a Kundalini Yoga teacher under the name Byakko, meaning White Tiger or White Light.
Dexter, Diana, and Byakko, artist, psychic, and Zen Yogi, the three sisters within have taken a lifetime to join into one."

DelMonte's work is confrontational, honest, finding meaning through experience. The inspiration from the unconscious becomes visual as hidden meanings take form to realize images that the unconscious tries to express. Delmonte's imagery elicits a response leaving one to interpretation. Rendered in gouache, watercolor, oil stick, chalk, graphite, and Conte crayon, the drawings span a timeline between 1984-1996.
"Dreams were a primary inspiration in my work, and Carl Jung, his deep interest in the interior life, how that holds both personal and universal truths; the idea of losing the soul and finding the soul and coming into wholeness.
I think of my work as old friends who accompanied me along my journey. The very early 80s work had been described as neoexpressionism, which I hadn't heard of at the time. The theme was domestic, societal conflict, and oppression. Large acrylic paintings, drawings in gouache and chalk, images later made into figurative painted clay sculptures. Following this dark shadow side of imagery and content (most of the work I destroyed), the Embryo series evolved, like a baby phase of looking inward of watching and learning. We begin again after we stop blaming others and seeing ourselves as victims. We contribute to violence when we have angry, violent thoughts, and those thoughts ripple out and can boomerang into our life. Most of the imagery in this work came from dreams.
My artwork took a different turn after I had a dream where I saw the text and heard the words, Research the occult, magic, mysterium, and documentation. I had no idea what this meant or how and what I was supposed to research and document. One week later, Jung's book jumped off a shelf at the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood. "Memories, Dreams, and Reflections" was the first book I read by Carl Jung, who considered dreams and intuition seriously. I received the validation I had unknowingly needed concerning my own experience of self-inquiry and preoccupation with my dreams. Everything began to make sense, and everything unfolded from there.
My mother's early death and dreams that followed were catalysts for a process of self-reflection and for lucidity surrounding her death and which inspired the Pleroma Series. Pleroma is a word Jung coined meaning Fullness of Being, similar to the Buddhist term "emptiness." Emptiness is our true nature, our fullness of being, which can't be debated or negated only experienced through meditation or realized when we forget ourselves while focused on an activity.
The Creator Slow Moving Series continued to phase two, contemplation, inspired by esoteric and traditional disciplines that came next in my practice and self-exploration. This series isn't literally about that. It's about a process and the internal effects of that process. We aim toward self-realization and the recognition of that at any particular moment. We're searching for the circle not knowing we're already at the center of it. All of us have ah ah moments. The conscious mind finally catches on because intuition, or deep knowing, delivers the message, and there's a familiar recognition. Those moments are experiential. Can't arrive there with the intellect. So I'm interested in the effects of that process, the momentary but profound ah ahs. I want to lure the viewer in, just for that moment. My imagery conveys a sort of camera snap that solidifies the fleeting nature of our lives, captures the still-point in activity when we experience a vastness of our Self. That vastness opens doorways. At that moment, we're no longer in a vessel on the sea with a map of our voyage. We are the sea. And the vessel. We don't need the map anymore.
The Virgin Work From The Principles of Being took an entirely alternate route; I refer to this series as figurative landscapes, painted outside at a friend's native California garden, with an oversized statue of the Virgin of Guadeloupe recessed in a dome above the roof of his Southwestern adobe-style home. I had begun my Zen practice, and with a profound communication with nature, I found freedom and flow in quite a different way from before. Nature's energy seemed to speak in quick, spontaneous bursts, and I swept color across the canvas, much like watching my thoughts sweep into the mind during Zazen (sitting Zen meditation); observing, witnessing the flow, and the momentary passing of that. How the energy around me is perceived interests me the most, the interpretation of that with paint, and the paintings seem to paint themselves. Sort of like the saying in the Zen tradition, "painting but not painting or, walking but not walking," meaning we become one with the activity. There's no longer me painting a canvas. "Me" disappears, and there's just painting. Similar to meditation at first, when "you" are an observer watching the thoughts, sensations in the body, the external stimuli around you, as you would when observing "the other." After a while, the duality fades away, and there's just "you." Fish don't see the ocean apart from themselves. These paintings were like that, absent of effort and conscious thought. There's an emptiness here. Absorption happens when we're fully present. Then colors float in like thoughts, brush sounds, the ground texture of raw linen, the smell of linseed oil, the saturation and release; all of this sensual moment-to-moment aliveness in the silence of painting is enough in itself.
Coming into wholeness is what all my work has been about, although I didn't recognize it at the time. I had a boundless flood of visual language filtering through my dreams, but I didn't understand what it all meant. I just made the art. Now I'm writing about it years later. This series was the last I did before I stopped. The late 90s.
The Figurative Studies were akin to practicing notes on a guitar. For three years, for three hours every Saturday, I made quick, usually 3-minute, renderings from the model, and it was lots of fun. In 156 days, approximately eight-hundred drawings turned out of this.
Most of my work, in general, has been a process of emptying this visual stream of consciousness until I felt satiated. I stopped making art when I no longer needed to fill this aspect of expression and began writing and my inner work with animals while practicing Zen meditation and teaching Kundalini Yoga. What's interesting is that it's all related. The visual language of art and the focused attention practiced in meditation opened the door to communicating (via pictures) with animals. It's all the same process applied differently.
 
Presently, I'm resuming artwork again as I step into a whole new interior landscape in my mind. I don't have much to say anymore. We'll see what comes out of that."