Paul Dilella was a very serious, very funny man.  He died in December, 1993 at the age of 46.  Candy Spilner and I have been entrusted with the responsibility of storing Paul’s drawings and sculpture for his wife Elizabeth. When I look at his artwork I guess Paul must have felt that birth and death are equally painful and everything in between is ridiculous.  Each of us chooses to contemplate life and death issues in our own personal way.  Some obsess on them.  Many try to ignore them all together.  Paul had the honesty to confront them directly without flinching.  But where we usually see pain and fear in tragic terms, Paul was also able to see and express the absurd humor of it.  We work all our lives toward cherished goals, only to be debilitated by physical deterioration and cut down by disease.  Many of us strive for recognition in our fields so that we may share our passion and contribute to culture, only to be ignored and then forgotten, cancelled, as he put it, before our efforts have born fruit.  This is not pretty stuff.  These are troubling ideas.  So why do Paul DiLella’s drawings and sculptures so immediately grab us in the gut and then not let go?  Why can we resist glancing away in horror before planting our eyes on these images?  Paul was a great artist.  He understood that even concepts that were the most difficult to swallow could be made digestible if they were delivered in a gorgeous presentation. So he employed the highest techniques of formal aesthetic artfulness to present his truths.  What more can a serious artist try to accomplish?  His work takes us, the viewers, somewhere we might rather not go, but desperately need to.  In the process we experience a catharsis because of the visual pleasure of looking at them.  Paul was a healer.