Coromo in New York, parts 1703 - 1706

 1703. The name of the gallery was Corelli Contemporary. The owner’s name was Aldo Corelli. He was aware of the similarity to the famous Castelli name, but that didn’t matter, his name was Corelli, and that was that. He deliberately left the word gallery out of his sign, simply because everybody else used the word. This was one of the reasons Coromo was not able to find the listing on the Internet, and besides, Aldo did not have a web site, he considered it a matter of principle.

1704. About this business of the pictures of Coromo having been sold for seven thousand dollars, there was a simple explanation for that. For an entire year Aldo had the pictures in his storage, and in his inventory all six were priced between four hundred and eight hundred dollars. But then there was a long article in the Times about Outsider art.

1705. The article questioned the validity of the movement beginning with several examples of artists who were part of it but the author pointed out that these artists had degrees from art schools, and mentioned examples of graduates of Yale who, upon receiving their degrees, spent some time as assistants in the studios of well known outsider artists. The author used the sentence, “They received their Master’s Of Fine Art in Outsiderism.”

1706. One had to get three quarters of the way through the article before he began singing the praises of the paranoid schizophrenics like Adolph Wolfli, ending with the sentence. “The only authentic pictorial art of our time is that which was never intended to be art, never intended to be framed, sold of even looked at by anyone. The real art of our century was created only to serve as a moment by moment attempt to save the soul of the dammed, suffering the torments of a personal hell of their own creation.”

Richard Britell