One of Tampa’s best-loved artists, the late Theo Wujcik (1936-2014) was “local” in the best of ways, helping transform a seedy, pre-”nightlife mecca” Ybor City into ground zero for a scrappy DIY creative scene that included not just visual artists but also actors, musicians and performers of all levels of talent and weirdness; his passing half a decade ago left a hole in the heart of anyone who’s been around long enough to remember making a terrified dash from their car to Impulse along a semi-deserted 7th Avenue.
Now, the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg is presenting a look at a particularly intriguing and evocative chapter in Wujcik’s work life, with the new show Cantos.
Wujcik’s art is narrative. The works now on display at the MFA tell the story of Dante Alighieri’s infamous trip through Hell, led by the poet Virgil, as told in Alighieri’s The Inferno.
It is a story with themes of “life, death, morality, and sin,” MFA curator Katherine Pill tells us. But more than that, Pill tells us this exhibition is about getting to know Theo Wujcik and his processes.
When you first walk into the gallery, a series of Wujcik’s collage studies greet you. The museum label explains that Wujcik used to collect random things he found around Ybor City, like “magazines, postcards and fliers.” Wujcik, being a bit superstitious, often attached significance to these chance encounters — like when he found a jewelry box in an industrial lot in Ybor with the word “Dante” on the silk lining. Pointing to a display case holding the small box, Pill tells us that Wujcik had just started his Dante paintings when he found the box, and he saw it as a good omen.
You can see many of Wujcik’s found images assembled into new images in Wujcik’s studies, like a picture-based form of note-taking Wujcik used to inform his larger works.
These larger paintings of Wujcik’s are dominated by symbolism and a chain-link fence motif that goes along quite well with the idea of being trapped in Hell. In Wujcik’s “Canto VIII,” he uses clothes hangers to represent suicide, as the 7th circle described in Dante’s Canto VIII is for those who commit suicide, Pill tells us. Pill also points out some mysterious foliage in the painting. “The sinners were turned to trees,” she says.
In “We Must Go,” we see more ordinary household objects taking on a more symbolic meaning. Here two patio umbrellas — one right side up and the other upside down — are used to portray the zero-gravity environment Dante and Virgil encounter in the last canto, when Virgil guides Dante up and out of Hell. Next to it, “Psst!” features the same two patio umbrellas, but now they contain images. The bottom umbrella shows a fragmented comic-book reality that doesn’t seem quite real. The top umbrella shows a domestic scene that appears very real. It’s as though we’re looking into the artist’s living room, and maybe we are.
Sometimes Hell is a place, as in Dante’s Inferno. But sometimes, we are caught up in our own personal hell, desperately searching for a way back to the people and places that we love. As Dante so eloquently puts it, “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself within a forest dark,/For the straightforward pathway had been lost.” And Wujcik’s life, and his art, express that journey, like Dante’s, in a singularly compelling — and hopefully inspiring — way.
Scott Harrell contributed to this article.
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This article appears in Apr 18-25, 2019.
