Ronald Gonzalez is a contemporary figurative artist based in upstate New York. Since the mid seventies the artist has worked from his garage studio creating elegiac sculptures and installations that are embodiments of death and loss infused with grotesque narrative, and pathos. Gonzalez works primarily in a series with steel armatures and macabre collections of time worn objects, and detritus from his surroundings. The work is then further eroded with metal filings, burned wax, glue, wire, and black soot creating a dramatic tonal range that both obscures and reveals anthropomorphic heads, torsos and figures that appear as charred fetishistic mementos possessing a visceral quality imbued with a sense of primal energy and distress that permeates his work. His obsessive production of angst-ridden sculptures explore the emotive, social, and psychological associations of decaying found objects that function as autobiographical metaphors charged with potent and recurring symbols with childhood and nostalgic references. Gonzalez’s sculpture is mournful, confrontational, and estranged, standing on the border between human personage and doomed phantom. His restless investigation of animating materials has produced an art of dissolution with archaic, apocalyptic, and quasi-alien elements that convey an animistic mode of thought and intensely evocative expression of the human condition.