Early on I pretended to be a statue- that mixture of reality and make-believe is my life.

Ronald Mario Gonzalez was born in Johnson City, N.Y. in 1952, the third of five children to Phillip Gonzalez and Lilia Finelli. His father was of Spanish and Jewish descent and worked at E J. shoe factory in Johnson City NY. and sold used cars. His mother was Italian, a devout catholic, who preached and did healings.  Gonzalez remembers falling asleep nightly to the sound of her reciting rosaries and visiting his father at the rubber mill where he watched him cut soles for shoes out of hot black rubber that were stacked together on the assembly line.  He remains acutely aware of having developed a repetitive impulse and factory mindset for working in piecemeal early in life.

During the early 50’s the family lived in a small house at the foot of South Mountain, in Binghamton, New York.  Surrounded by woods and fields. This immediate natural environment of a dark and gray rural landscape inhabited by a forest of dying and growing forms as well as real and imaginary creatures was an endless source of discovery, fear. and fascination.

In his childhood Gonzalez underwent several stomach surgeries to correct a birth defect from his mother having German measles during pregnancy. He filled these recuperative years in front of a small black and white television." Growing up in fifties consumer culture of talking appliances and mass-produced excess led to my defective television mentality.” This preoccupation with the new transforming medium of TV also created a kinship with caricatured personalities, holly-wood sci-fi films, monsters, robots, alien creatures, and corpses, along with the post-cold war threat of nuclear apocalypse. These encounters with the co- existence, of beauty and repulsion, humor and sadness as well as the undercurrents of social turmoil, and existential absurdity in those formative years set the stage for his overwhelming desire to represent an amalgam concept in bodily form. In these early years Gonzalez began playing with gumball machine trinkets and dollhouse miniatures that he collected and filling socks with dirt, leaves, and sticks and making small figures and toy makeshift playthings from object debris from the streets near his home.

In the mid-sixties his family moved to the east side of Binghamton where his father opened a used car lot next to the family home where he played with rusted auto junk parts and castoffs. He attended Catholic School and became an altar boy, spending endless hours in saint Mary’s church basement surrounded by religious statues imagining being a sculptor. Gonzalez was fixated by the spiritual and physical pathos of church statuary and fascinated by their intercessionary role between people and an invisible metaphysical world.

At age 11, he travelled for the first time to New York City with his mother to see the World's Fair. After separating from her to enter an attraction that featured a house of mirrors, he found himself entrapped for several hours. When he found his way out, he wandered through the fair where he saw his first work of art- Michelangelo's "Pieta."

In 1970, after several years of trying his hand at boxing and other various working experiences he returned to finish high school followed by a series of local restaurant jobs. After wondering into a library, Gonzalez saw a Time Life book on Rodin's "Gates of Hell." showing photographs of boxes of small plaster fragments. He recalls being obsessed with the idea of lost souls and by imaginary tiny worlds of figures that paralleled the real life and death drama of existence. “I saw the boxes as private collections of ideas about time, memory, disintegration, and the expressive power of images in serial form. That day he bought a bag of clay and began to work in his bedroom making small figures and body fragments incorporating found objects.  He soon assessed so many figures that he bought and pitched a used tent in a friend's back yard to store his work followed by a series of basement and attic studios where he made plater figures and reliefs.

In 1976, Gonzalez enrolled in the Fine Arts Department at Harpur College, Binghamton, New York, to study sculpture and to use the studios to work on his figures.  During this time, he learned to weld simplified skeletal armatures for support allowing his figures to take on a greater scale and to incorporate a more varied assortment of materials and objects. After graduating in 1983, he travelled to Italy, France, and Greece. During his trip Gonzalez met and visited the studios of Giacomo Manzu in Rome, and Manuel Neri, in Carrara Italy.

In 1982, after the death of his father, who left behind an old used car lot garage on Robinson street, Gonzalez converted it into a studio.  His early work consisted of plaster figures that incorporated found objects and mixed media.  The artist also made assemblages and plaster reliefs that combined collage, text, and small objects, he described as "dream films reduced to a single frame.”  It was during this time the artist met his lifelong companion Cynthia Riley, a painter that he later married. In 1983, he had his first solo exhibition in a renovated section of the EJ shoe factory where his father had worked in the 1950’s. In the late 80’s and 90’s Gonzalez worked out of the garage studio referred to as the "figure factory" by neighborhood kid’s making hundreds of figures.  During these years the artist focused on large scale serial grouping of humanoid figures installed in site specific settings in museums and outdoor spaces that featured a variety of organic and found materials.

In 1999, Gonzalez joined the Art Department at Binghamton University where he continues to teach as a professor of Art and Sculpture. Over the next 10 years his work consisted of both small and life size figures and fragments in states of disintegration and distress, exhibited individually or in groups staged on long runway platforms.  These works were dominated by the use of corroded found objects from his surroundings and steel armatures that evoked a wasted, desolate realm where blackened heads and bodies are marked by trauma and loss.

In 2000, his Robinson street studio caught fire and the contents destroyed along with several thousand drawings and sculptural works. After the studio was renovated, the artist continued to mass produce works in that space. In 2003 the artist purchased a house with an outbuilding that he used for sculpture storage that was eventually converted into his current studio in 2014.

Since that time, Gonzalez has produced hundreds of new heads, figures, sculptural assemblage works and drawings. His recent work continues to re- invent figurative forms highlighting idiomatic color with collage and assemblage materials transformed into human busts, heads, and small figures in a series.