Vincent Desiderio: Recent Paintings
Marlborough Gallery, New York
December 2, 1997 - January 3, 1998
Marlborough New York presents en exhibition of recent paintings by VINCENT DESIDERIO (b. 1955). The exhibition consists of fifteen oil paintings, including nine in triptych form, painted during the past four years.
For Vincent Desiderio, the importance of painting to the life of the imagination is absolute. The act of painting makes available to the artist realms of understanding which are unforseeable outside of its processes. It is through the narrative, the fictional reconstruction of events, both personal and public, that Desiderio attempts to chart the vague and often elusive character of man at the end of the 20th century.
The works are composed in rich tonalities with optical layerings of cool and warm color. Viewing them, the visitor is conscious of a strong connection with pre-modernist painting. Yet, it is with an informed and discerning eye that Vincent Desiderio aligns himself with his historical antecedents. The process of creating the works takes a central place serving as a metaphor for being. What is most intriguing to him is the strong connection between his process and how one thinks through an image to its final resolution. Vincent Desiderio's technique, in fact, allegorizes the artist's quest for a replenished imaginative space.
Though Vincent Desiderio is undisputedly a painter of reality, that description alone only begins to describe what he accomplishes in his work. His intense blend of autobiography and dislocation, reveal him as influenced by existential thought and experience as well. The results are the portrayal of seemingly real situations through a dreamlike veil of trance and trauma.
In the painting entitled The Interpretation Of Color, the levels of meaning begin to reveal themselves from the choice of its title onward. Vincent Desiderio pays homage to his modernist past choosing a title which refers to Joseph Albers' life-long work (The Interaction Of Color). The painting's subject is a figure who, overfed on culture, has collapsed on the floor in a post-prandial stupor. Around him, one sees the emblems of his history. Art texts strewn about evoke a spiral of centrifugal movement. The nuanced paint handling contributes to the effect of slow movement as one descends into the vortex of this vertiginous space. He is a man of the land of Cockaigne, the mythical realm of human excess, conjuring in his slumber a narrative regarding the whole future of painting.
In the triptych entitled Mimetic Composition, three images present contrasting visions recording grief. In the center, a haunting image of a man's face appears as if staring into a mirror. Thus, the image of the sick man symbolizes passage through life. To the right, a wedding banquet or birthday celebration is set up for video-taping. But at the same time, it is abandoned and frozen in time, becoming a metaphor for the desire to record the celebration of events as if to eulogize them. Finally to the left, the most receding of the panels presents a life cast of a woman's face grimacing. It represents the inability of the signifier and the signified to meet, or the failure of words or images to touch the object itself. Vincent Desiderio's work continues to explore life's deeply rooted mysteries, hopes, and fears in a taught balance of change and stasis.
Born in Philadelphia in 1955, VINCENT DESIDERIO joined Marlborough Gallery in 1991, and had his first one man show in 1993. He has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums worldwide and his works are included in numerous private and public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Denver Art Museum; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Galerie Sammlung Ludwig, Aachen, Germany; the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; and the Indiana University Museum of Art, Indiana, PA; among others.
In 1996, Vincent Desiderio became the first American artist to receive the prestigious International Prize of Contemporary Art presented by the Monaco-based Prince Pierre Foundation.
Beginning January 7th., three exhibitions, Motherwell: Works On Paper, Juan Genovès: Works On Paper and Still Lifes: Prints & Photographs will be on view continuing through the month of January, 1998.
MARLBOROUGH GALLERY
40 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.marlboroughgallery.com
