SACRAE PARTICULAE EX NIHILO: THE ART OF GROMYKO PADILLA SEMPER,THE BOOK



Introduction by John Paul Thornton

There is a sleek body of a young man stretched out across a freshly paved asphalt road. His skin is golden and glazed, like the surface of a fine painting. With his head, he gnaws into future, which promises freedom from cultural confinement, a flurry of literary courage and unwavering song. Yet, with his hands, the young man scoops deeply into a pre-Renaissance dawn… the days when the plague was still dancing on the backs of rats and Science was a brazen, posturing toddler, belly full of poetry.

There is a sleek body of a young man, and his name is Gromyko Semper.

Gromyko is an artist who suckled the breast of knowledge and refused to unlatch. While other global babies drank a mixture of popular lowbrow –culture and weaned themselves of further sustenance, Gromyko seems to have arrived hungry for the richer and more dangerous cream of ancient regimes.

The rebirth of Surrealism as a viable modality has, (as have many renewed branches of expression) been stoked through the grand technology of our time. The fact that Gromyko has global collectors, global audience and an understanding of broad history can be linked directly to the internet. I, in fact, came to know this artist through a casual social-networking site, the technological equivalent of le café de Deux Magots. Simply put, artists (and collectors) no longer need to venture to Rome or Paris to become immersed within the current. They only need to click on line. Today, the concept of the artist as a lost, unnoticed genius is no longer possible. In a previous medieval decade, Gromyko might have fallen into that purgatory. Through our technology, through the joyous publication of this volume, Gromyko is freed from nationality, region and school. He has become a respected and fascinating voice in the global Surrealism movement.

Versed in the visual language of Italian and Germanic woodcuts, Gromyko has developed a delivery-system of careful emulation and slight-of-hand, coaxing viewers to believe that they are coming face to face with lofty and certified prints from a quaint, historical age. Upon contemplation, his images reveal themselves to be contemporary works that contain our own epoch’s concerns and outrages. But Gromyko does not smirk to us as he presents these visual ironies. He looks us squarely in the eye, daring us to blink. After all, Gromyko is more than a mere blasphemer. He has spent his young life, it seems, learning how to articulate heresy like an authentic lover of truth. Strip-mining across time, borrowing aesthetics and bringing icons down to earth is fair game. In the hands of pranksters it remains merely irreverent. Gromyko refuses to linger in that superficial state of play. He shares us with his intellectual rage of knowing too much. He demands that we too remain sharpened and fortified enough to withstand a trip through his prolific visionary world.



John Paul Thornton, Professor of Art History, Pierce College.

Author, “Art and Courage: Stories to Inspire the Artist-Warrior Within”

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