Steven Parrino at Galerie Loevenbruck
Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was a modernist mannerist grasp with an intuition for annihilation. His graphic oeuvre, which brings one thing of the excessive power of hardcore punk music to the delicacy of drawing, appears to hail from a misplaced golden age when an artist may nonetheless inhabit a psychological house separate from mainstream popular culture. Loevenbruck’s modest batch of works on paper from 1989 onward spotlight Parrino’s melancholy aesthetic and distinctive sensibility, which mingled the cynical with the transcendent.
Parrino, who got here of age in a late-Seventies artwork scene dominated by the rhetoric concerning the dying of portray, was lay in historic reference, not abstraction. As with most of the artists related to Gallery Nature Morte, the Nineteen Eighties-era neo-Conceptualist East Village hang-out the place he first confirmed, Parrino started taking part in with insincere signifiers that he finally got here to like. In his graphic work, a semiotic suspicion, in line with Man Debord’s Society of the Spectacle—from which Parrino nicked a phrase for his 2003 ebook, No Textual content—took on a sort of subdued hysteria. Parrino relished the confrontations that may very well be created by injecting campy components into severe high-art and/or punk references. The black rectangle in Black Flag, 2003, which appropriates and rotates a kitsch drawing Raymond Pettibon made for a Black Flag band flyer, could be learn as a Pierre Soulages canvas. Moreover the plain nod to Malevich’s well-known 1915 portray, the black sq. in Untitled, 2003, additionally suggests La Monte Younger’s Black Album report cowl from 1969. By these nested references, Parrino made it clear that an artist doesn’t work in a vacuum, however in a area of lifeless clichés.
— Joseph Nechvatal
