Tarot Cards Tell All: Carmen Spera Showcases His Spectacular Art at Bergamot Station
“They say there’s a heaven for those who will wait
Some say it’s better but I say it ain’t.
I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
The sinners are much more fun...”
Billy Joel
The words from “Only the Good Die Young” were the first things that came to mind for artist Carmen Spera when we introduced ourselves and our magazine to him. We found him in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station, a renovated railroad station where he and dozens of his artistic peers were showcasing their works for all of Los Angeles to see.
The name of his show was “The Fool And His Friends,” mostly, he said, “because I’m a fool and these are my friends.” Whether they are sinners or saints, it’s hard to say.
For Carmen, art has always been an evolving beast but after a successful run using etched glass a decade ago, he thought it was time to revisit the work that had opened him up to a wider audience.
“I’ve been working on glass since the late 1970s. I work with different materials but I’m doing more glass now because I have an artist residency at a glass factory. It’s on a pier in Brooklyn overlooking the harbor and I get to use all of their equipment.”
Having spent much of his twenty-plus year career in New York, he became deeply affected by the events that have transpired over the last decade and used this night and these cards to showcase those themes. Tonight, far from Brooklyn, we’re near another ocean, standing beneath the images from the Tarot deck. What a strange hand we’ve been dealt over the past few years, these faces and hands and bodies all meticulously etched in glass.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, what you are, how old you are, if you’re in front of ‘The Hangman,’ or you’re in front of ‘Strength,’ you’re going to respond.
It’s like a dream, those iconic symbols that really resonate with people.
The first piece on display, “The Fool,” was also the Tarot card that deeply moved Carmen.
“I relate to it because when I went to the (Tarot) deck, the first one I that I wanted to do was ‘The Fool,’ because I related to it. He seemed like a guy who was following his own destiny, maybe foolishly but he also believes in himself and is true to himself in a way.”
Carmen then smiled and added, “Besides, a town without a fool is not a whole town!”
The pieces themselves are as innovative as they are captivating. Carmen uses his penchant for etched glass work to bring the striking images from the Tarot deck to life and infuses them with “found” items such as sea glass, chain link and even a wild card - human hair - which lovingly adorns the pubic area of “The Star.”
“I wasn’t quite satisfied, it was kind of flat. Then I was with a female friend of mine, who had sort of prickly hair, so I said, ‘come here,’ and then I just started to work on the pubic area. Later as I was working on it, I started crying because my life, this moment, the essence of what I do was all about working in all this pubic hair, and then I just started laughing so hard.”
It’s this fine attention to detail that helps “increase the genius,” as Alex pointed out and also separates Carmen’s creations from the rest of the shuffle. For this show though, he found one last detail to help the art come to life when he enlisted the services of one of America’s Top 100 Psychics, Voxx Voltaire, to conduct Tarot card readings throughout the show.
But she soon proved even more helpful, as she incorporated her knowledge of the Tarot cards to help Carmen come up with a creative way to display his works by grouping some of his smaller pieces into hanging sections of “spells” where three or four mini-pieces combined to create a theme such as “Love,” “Strength” or even for the more macabre-inclined, “Death.”
“I put a word out to some friends and I found Voxx,” Carmen recalled. “I was originally going to show these as separate pieces but she suggested I group them. So she picked some prices for me, what cards, what order...”
He laughed at this and then added, “I just told my team, ‘She’s calling the prices and I don’t even know her!’”
Someone who has been doing this since the age of seven and has performed over 250,000 readings on everyone from the boardwalk crowds in Venice to CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies such as Disney probably has seen and done a lot, but I’m not sure if she has ever priced art.
“I love to read a lot of people but I’m balls to the wall, I cut no slack,” she said with a sinister grin before adding: “I’m spiritual but I’m fun.”
Soon the enchanting and ethereal Voxx looked to the cards to tell us the future for Sinning In LA. Myself, Alex and Jacopo all drew cards that according to Voxx, “Couldn’t have been any better!”
“You need to realize that this might be the ripest moment of your life,” she said. “But here’s the weird thing, if you blow it, get cocky about and fritter away all the good energy, you’ll really regret it. Just like The Knack regret album number two.”
We promised to stick together and continue our pledge to dig deeper which she was happy to hear and added:
The greatest success comes with each other.
She was also one of the huge hits of the evening with her special skill set in high demand for the duration of the show.
When we found Carmen again at the end of the evening, he was basking in the glow of a most successful showing, and we were trying to find places for our many empty wine glasses. I asked him that with so many sales (including a bunch for the “spells” that Voxx helped arrange), what it was about his particular style that seems to suit the City of Angels so well.
“I know what I do and I try to stay true to myself. As ‘The Fool’ would.”
Myself, sometimes I’m a Knight, and sometimes I’m the Devil. I could find myself beneath the Tower looking for love, or spinning around life’s Wheel of Fortune.
Carmen, humble and talented, could play the Fool for as long as he wants, but behind the card is only Strength.
We’re just here to share in the fortune.
Watch: Sinning in LA Gets a Tarot Reading (Video by Jacopo)
Watch: Carmen Spera Interview (Video by Jacopo)
Available at Lois Lambert Gallery //
2525 Michigan Ave E3, Santa Monica, CA 90404 310-829-6990
loislambertgallery.com
