Romeo & Juliet
Joey Belardi works on surfaces. Hopefully this doesn’t strike the reader as a truism; of course, all painters are concerned with surfaces, almost by definition, but a lap around Cruise Control Gallery, from frame to candy-colored frame of Belardi’s Romeo and Juliet—a Looney Toons-esque storyboard rendering of Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy—reveals an exceptional primacy of surface. Belardi’s paintings emphatically exceed themselves, their content having been thoroughly extruded up and out. The paintings give themselves over absolutely; all they “contain”—it’s all right there, right on the surface, practically bounding from its two dimensions. Every element of Belardi’s Verona distorts itself toward the full throated conveyance of a frame’s singular meaning. In its bid for unequivocal exclamation, Belardi fashions a story world which knows no emotional subtlety, has no room or time for the ambiguous gesture.
It’s a century-old cartoon tradition, traceable at least to the Golden Age sketches of the ‘Termite Terrace’ set at Warner Bros., whose genes Belardi inherits as a guiding dramatic principle. A Western canon all its own, no less influential than Shakespeare, American cartoons owe a great debt to Bob Clampett—the legendary animator responsible for Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Tweety, et. al.—whose legacy here, in Belardi’s work, presents as an extreme economy of emotional expression. Or, in other words, as the superficial quality—not a deficiency, but really the work’s peculiar strength. As the cartoon historian Michael Barrier writes of John Kricfalusi, creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show, “no one else since Clampett has made cartoons whose characters' emotions distort their bodies so powerfully.” Viewers will no doubt also detect the Ren & Stimpy influence in Belardi’s work, not just for its elastic bodies, but also in its retro Atomic Age details: the asterisk stars and outsize moon above Juliet’s balcony (the Capulet garden rendered here like a mid-century Manhattan skyline), the geometry of Friar Lawrence’s pharmacy shelf and of back-alley brick facades. This geometry, it should be noted, does important work in the vain of Clampett; rectangles warp into trapezoids, distorting themselves toward the univocal message. These are backdrops alive with empathy, caught in the gravitational pull of character emotion—see, for instance, the skyscrapers leaning over a murderous Romeo.
From Saturday, February 15th to March 29th, Cruise Control Cambria hosts Belardi’s cartoon Verona, tragic battleground of feline Capulets and murine Montagues. Bound to the force of these emphatic surfaces, maybe the gallery walls, too, will bend for Romeo.
Words by Justin Scheer
2025