New York is a shiny lure, a trick of the light, whose solid center might evaporate at the click of a button. This city either takes you and wraps you in its steely arms, or kicks you back to the sticks real quick. Gogy arrived here at 17, got wrapped, adapted fast, tapped into the grid. Everything began to click. The mission he chose was to communicate the reality of the street that raised him, and a sense of its ‘fleeting, dreamy, and hazy nature’. To let people see things in ways they are not used to seeing. ‘To show how a kid throwing a punch can be so beautiful, not just harsh and blunt. Or how the light shines on faces in the ‘hood the same way it shines on a blonde on a summer lawn'.
'Work comes out of work', an industrious artist said. Gogy bought into that, kept his nose to the stone, and every time a door opened he walked on through. During a brief interval in Madrid, he discovered the Surrealists, saw that razor drawn across the eye in ‘Chien Andalou.’ His own eye opened, he began to grasp the unlimited possibilities of art. Back in New York, Gogy picked up a camera and began recording everything in front of him, high and low, raw and cooked. The chairs in his apartment, neighbors in the street, each face on the pillow beside him. Accumulating evidence, letting the light leak in, sanctifying immaculate bodies and everyday objects. Freezing life’s ecstatic moments of contact and action, ricochets and near misses. In between taking the pulse of a thousand and one days and nights, he lit out for new territories, turned his gaze on Tokyo, extracted some rough magic from that unfamiliar landscape.
The world is filled with many forms of beauty, and if you pay close attention, it will follow you around, expose its diverse abstractions and fleshy incarnations to the mind’s eye. Sometimes visual images act much faster than words. Gogy's pictures bump up against each other, sparks fly, splinters of truth emerge, shiny fragments from the story of a life ongoing, going on, tracks running all the way back to Worcester, Mass.
- Max Blagg
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80 pgs, 14 × 21 cm, Softcover, 2010,
