From Inside a Bad-Guy Wrestler, a Brutal Artist Screamed for Release (original) (raw)

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From Inside a Bad-Guy Wrestler, a Brutal Artist Screamed for Release

By Corey Kilgannon

March 15, 2012 6:45 pm March 15, 2012 6:45 pm

Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesPhillip Thies, formerly known as Damien Demento, at the Tachi Gallery in TriBeCa, where a show of his paintings and sculptures opened on Thursday.

There was always something artistically sinister about Damien Demento, the loony thug who thrilled World Wrestling Federation fans in the early 1990s with his stringy Fu Manchu beard-mustache combo, bear-claw poncho and bad-guy persona

A Salvador Dalí on steroids, equally adept at revving up bloodthirsty fans or body-slamming foes, Demento was the brainchild of the fertile and somewhat twisted mind of one Phillip Thies, who grew up a tough street kid in Brooklyn and on Staten Island with an outsize personality to match his physique.

Behind Mr. Thies’s penchant for bedlam in the ring, though, was a keen artist who had been drawing, painting and sculpturing since childhood, and even through his adult years running with tough crowds, working construction, serving jail time and renting himself out as hired muscle.

A retrospective of Mr. Thies’s slightly-more-subdued other career is now on display at the Tachi Gallery in TriBeCa, where his paintings and sculptures are part of a joint exhibition with an artist called Uccello.The show, called Karnal, opened on Thursday and runs through April 14.

It is Mr. Thies’s first art show, and many of the pieces partake of the brutality, showmanship and braggadocio that infused his professional wrestling days.

As he walked through the gallery on Monday, chomping on an unlit cigar, Mr. Thies, 53, said that he hoped his show would be “an open slap to the art community,” but that he also hoped art world insiders would find his work provocative and sincere.

Julie Glassberg for The New York TimesA few of Mr. Thies’s screaming heads, on display at the Tachi Gallery.

For a painting called “Circus Freak,” Mr. Thies said he used a photograph of the wrestler George (The Animal) Steele as a model for the face. The subject is seen slicing his forehead with a razor blade – a well-known secret of the wrestling world. The wrestler would hide a blade and during the match, use it on himself to create a bloody mess for the crowd. It is a trick Mr. Thies said he never tried.

“The promoter would come over and say, ‘I want some color tonight,’” he recalled. “I’d say, ‘No, I don’t do that.’ I made a decision I wasn’t going to do it. I decided to use my skill, ability, talent and being an entertainer. I wasn’t going to go out there with my head all carved up.”

The self-slicing emerges again in another piece: a grotesque skull that Mr. Thies equipped with an audio recording of an old-school wrestler explaining the razor-blade practice.

For another bust, Mr. Thies dressed a screaming head with something like the headgear worn by Mexican lucha libre wrestlers. On a female figure, spikes sticking out of the head harken back to the bear claws that adorned Demento’s warm-up outfit.

Also on exhibit is a series of seven screaming male heads, one of them in a New York Jets helmet. Mr. Thies had a tryout with the Jets after college, he said, but did not make the team.

Mr. Thies as Damien Demento, taking on The Undertaker in 1993.

Mr. Thies, who lives with his sister in the Flatiron District, majored in art at Wagner College while on a football scholarship. As a standout lineman, he was an imposing 330 pounds at 6 feet 2 inches tall, and he could bench-press 500 pounds, he said.

After his semi-pro football career fizzled, he began pro wrestling in 1987 under various ring names and settled on the Demento persona, who was said to hail from “the outer reaches of your mind.”

In the World Wrestling Federation, he wrestled such legends as Jim Brunzell and The Undertaker, but after a dispute about drug testing, Mr. Thies left the fold in 1993. He found some acting work, most notably in “Die Hard: With a Vengeance.” (Check out the monologue on his demo reel.)

He admits he would consider a wrestling comeback if a decent offer came along.

“It’s like an old girlfriend — you only remember the good stuff,” said Mr. Thies, who is in tip-top shape and has been practicing at the same wrestling school he started at years ago, in Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. He has stepped back in the ring several times in recent years, including several matches this winter in Brooklyn.

In the gallery on Monday, he said: “I was always an artist who dabbled in wrestling. Hopefully, if people see this show, I’ll be famous for this, rather than something I dabbled in years ago.”