Gallery Contemporanea Review
"Dealer's Choice: Artists from Georgia" offers a small but appetizing taste of painting, drawing and sculpture from the Atlanta region..... Of the shows two painters, the one who interests me more is Tom Graffagnino,....
"He makes gouache (opaque watercolor) abstracts on paper that create a sense of depth and space. He is not interested in Renaissance-style perspective space, but in the spatial qualities that colors themselves generate.
"If daubs of yellow, red and blue are placed on a canvas, they will appear to be on different planes. Through this optical illusion, color can be manipulated to create a feeling of space. Graffagnino's paintings are small but look like strange extra-terrestrial landscapes in which cliffs hang in the air and chasms float up into the sky.
"Even more interesting are Graffagnino's tiny collages. They have titles like "Reliquia XXXIV", which give them religious or mystic associations---perhaps they have effective power as some relics are said to have.
"At any rate, they are tiny, no more than 6 X 6 inches and famed like little stages or display cases. Inside each "case", abstract objects seem propped up by an internal wall. The artist plays with holes---some of the collages have rectangular cut-outs. Others have cut-outs with paper covers. All this adds to the strangeness and mystery."
Wayne Hamm
Jacksonville Journal
August 29, 1985