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Shadow boxer
Found things become art in Rahway master's hands
Shadow boxer
Found things become art in Rahway master's hands
Story by VICKI HYMAN / Photo by JOHN O'BOYLEOne art aficionado peered at the mixed-media assemblage by octogenarian artist Marcel Truppa, taking in the fraying bits of fabric, the waxy corrugated cardboard, the translucent onionskin covered with faded script -- in Italian and mounted backward -- and, in the center, an antiquated cog oxidized to a goldish green.
"I love the patina on that," she says. "How did you get it like that?"
"I don't know," Truppa says. "I found it in the garbage."
Watchworks and popsicle sticks, rubber balls and crushed tin cans, tacks and tar paper. A molded tray that used to house pastels, now it's an accidental mosaic of waxy bits of pigment. Shreds of antiquated type or Renaissance portraiture, the respectable faces bisected by Truppa's pen, or sliced into strips and reassembled out of order.
"See what this is?" he asks, running a finger over a three-dimensional collage that appears to be spilling forth crushed lapis. It's paint that Truppa scraped off an old ladder. Truppa's approach to art is more instinctual than intellectual. "The texture of paper, the color, sometimes gives me the whole composition," he says. "I don't care what it really means. I let the person decide. They take apart what they want to get out of it."
Truppa has lived in Rahway for most of his life, and two years ago, the city offered him a gallery space in its burgeoning arts district, a couple of storefronts away from the building that once housed his family's grocery store on Irving Street. But renovations to the apartment above the studio caused a flood, and he's between spaces now.
Until earlier this week, he housed much of his work at Edge Art, down the street. Dozens of pieces hung haphazardly on the pegboard walls, while smaller works lay on folding tables -- the lyrical shadow boxes and cryptic collages that he's been producing for the last 40 years, but also his earlier, more traditional watercolors, acrylics and pencil drawings.
There's even a luminous pencil study of roots along a river bank that he did back in the early 1990s. With a note of mischief he says, "I wanted to find out if I could still draw."
Early aptitude
Truppa was born to Italian parents in France in 19--. "You don't have to put that down," he interrupts. "I'm very vain about that. I don't know why, I should be very proud."
Well, let's just say that for his parents, World War I was a fresh memory. He spent his childhood, however, in a small village in southern Italy, about halfway between Naples and Rome, the oldest of three siblings, and according to his sister Josephine Polhemus, the adored son.
For most children in the village, education stopped after the fourth grade, but Truppa's family had some money -- one grandfather was a grocer, the other a druggist -- and they sent him for more schooling to a town about 20 miles away, up a rough, winding mountain trail on a donkey.
His father left to join his two brothers in Rahway in the 1930s, and eventually brought over the rest of his family.
Truppa had already started to show an aptitude for art. At Rahway High School, he was known as the resident artist, his sister recalls, as well as a good dancer and quite the ladies' man. His parents encouraged his interest -- his father was amateur sculptor -- and they sent him to the Pratt Institute, and when money got tight, the well-regarded Newark School of Fine and Industrial Arts. Upon graduation, he was offered a job teaching color and design, which he says he loved, except for the paycheck -- about $15 a day. He moved into advertising, working in New York as an art director, specializing in catalog design.
He married and had two daughters, and they stayed in Rahway, where his close-knit family lived, always maintaining a studio in his home and continuing to paint, showing his work in galleries in New Jersey and New York.
Lawrence Cappiello, the director of the Arts Guild of Rahway, grew up near Truppa's home on River Road, and remembers Truppa working in his garage, poring over his latest project while seated in a lawn chair pulled up his worktable.
"When I moved back here in 1988, I would stop and see him if he had the door up," Cappiello says. "He'd say, 'I found this, and it's going to go over here! Now, I found this, and it's going to go over there!' He could make a piece of poetry out of a piece of a cracked canvas from an old painting, or a piece of cardboard ripped in half."
These days, Truppa's home is literally his studio -- his one-room apartment in a senior home, where he still painstakingly pieces together collages on his table. He still gets around, spending time in his studio, checking in on other artists, dropping in at other galleries. Since he broke his hip four years ago, he walks slowly with a cane, occasionally slipping his hand under a companion's arm to steady himself.
"I'm still working," he says. "Pretty hard. I just didn't roll over and die."
"When his gallery was open, he was constantly selling the work out of there," says Francesca Azzara, another Rahway artist with a studio a few doors down from Truppa's. "You realize when an artist is that old, that pretty soon there won't be anything new. What's available will soon dry up. So I think people are realizing that he's absolutely a local treasure."
Life-altering encounter
For a few years after graduating from college, Truppa worked at Merck & Co., the pharmaceutical giant then headquartered in Rahway. The company occasionally sponsored exhibits of workers' art, and Truppa entered a few of his watercolors. Not long after, George Merck himself asked to meet with Truppa, and commissioned a couple of paintings of the plant from the young painter.
A couple of weeks ago, he got another call from Merck. Someone had come across his watercolors and had them matted, framed and mounted in the company offices. The company sent a limousine to pick him up and escorted him up for a viewing. "When I saw them, I said, 'These are not bad.'"
He might have been content to paint conventional landscapes, still lifes and portraits had he not met he renowned artist Joseph Cornell, who is famous for his exquisite, dreamy shadow boxes pieced together from found objects. Truppa had been visiting a friend's gallery in New York in the early 1960s, and she invited him into the back room to see some new, unusual work.
"I came back out and said, 'What am I looking for?'
"'Didn't you see those boxes on top of the pedestals?'
"'Oh?' Just like that. 'Oh, that's art?'"
At that moment, the phone rang and Cornell was on the other end of the line. The gallery owner put Truppa on the phone with him, and Cornell invited him to his house in Queens. He eventually took him up on the offer and visited him in his cellar studio, talking with him for hours. He left transformed.
"You could see things happening right away," he says of the assemblages. "I was a lot happier pulling things together, the texture of sandpaper, the different colors of corrugated cardboard, rubber balls. I found beauty in the pieces."
Though there's more than a little Cornell in Marcel's early shadowboxes, Cappiello says Truppa has come into his own. "For the last 40 years, he's been making an phenomenal range of artwork to encourage some of those ideas," he says.
Art from the ordinary
"We'll be going down the street, and there's a can that's flattened, been driven over a million times, he'll stop and pick it up, and say how beautiful it is," laughs Polhemus. "My normal response was 'Uh-huh.'"
"If you see marbles or wooden balls ..." she continues -- "Or rusting nails," Truppa interjects -- "or cardboard that coffee's been poured on, those things remind you of him."
Truppa recalls one assemblage he made with a background comprised entirely of raisins. He had to store it in his refrigerator, so it wouldn't fall apart in the heat of summer. He made another out of sugar cubes. "The cubes got melty, the sugar turned brown and dripped down. It became a wonderful color. I never could have done that. Nature came and did it for me."
He points to a dark flap of fabric on one work. "Tarp," he says. "You notice the colors? It's the earthy colors that I love very much." He indicates another corner of the assemblage. "That texture is from a ... a ... I don't even know what it is." He pauses. "Each collage that I do is an expression of the things that I want to bring out. I never know what's going to happen."
He interrupts his discourse; something has caught his eye. "I wonder what that is?" he muses. He uses his cane to move it closer. It's a wood chip. He flicks it aside. "I don't pick up everything."
Vicki Hyman can be reached at vhyman@starledger.com.
