ART CITIES: Paris-Steven Parrino

Steven Parrino is best known for his signature ‘misshaped’ monochromes with slashed, torn, or twisted canvases. A pioneer in performance and video art, his radicalism was born out of a deep understanding of the history of painting and the avant-garde. The vibe of his work derives from his other loves: Pop iconography and the subversive counterculture of the Hell’s Angels, the occult, and the No Wave and punk rock movements.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

The survey exhibition with works by Steven Parrino features manipulated canvas paintings, works in sprayed enamel on vellum, and other works on paper. Building painting that he had come to regard as critically dead and buried, Parrino steered a course from restrained abstraction to a far more complex and confrontational visual language. Parrino’s oeuvre was built on the infamous 1980s dictum that “Painting is Dead”. Influenced by punk-rock existentialism and the ‘shaped paintings’ dominating abstract painting in the 1960s, Parrino tore, crushed, and twisted canvases, transforming his works into radical sculptural objects. Almost performative in his approach, Parrino would start by painting monochrome colour onto his canvases before detaching them from the frame and restructuring the work into a renewed three-dimensional picture. Folded, creased, and pierced, Parrino’s artworks seek to break down the illusion of the picture plane and the post-war celebration of flatness. Resisting the Minimalist rhetoric of the painting as object, which operated as a mode of realism, Parrino renegotiated the literal and physical boundaries of an artwork. At the end of the 1980s Parrino’s work began to diverge aesthetically. Never completely comfortable with the Neo-Geo’ label, his work took on a darker, more monumental character. The iconic monochrome paintings took shape as radical, nihilistic, pop sculptural objects—a transformation that fused historical tradition with the defunct notion of the avant-garde. The exhibition in Paris is anchored by three large paintings: “Touch and Go” (1989–95), “Spin-Out Vortex (Black Hole)” (2000), and “The Self-Mutilation Bootleg 2 (The Open Grave)”(1988/2003). All are punctuated by holes. In the first work, the flat surface of a panel coated in red enamel is interrupted by two lozenge-shaped apertures, which lend it a utilitarian air. In the second, a circular void at the heart of a black-lacquered square seems to exert a spiraling gravitational pull on the surrounding fabric, twisting it off its axis and threatening to swallow it whole. And in the third, a shiny black rectangular canvas hangs above a larger panel of the same color. The last also features a geometric opening and lies on the floor, bent and slumped against the gallery wall. Originally, the work was brightly colored; Parrino repainted and reconfigured it fifteen years after it was first exhibited. In several earlier works, including “Disruption” (1981) and “International Style” (1983), Parrino pairs monochrome acrylic paintings on torn or crumpled canvases with framed photographs reproducing such confrontational images as a 1928 shot of Ruth Snyder, the first woman whose execution in the electric chair was photographed. The use of pop-cultural reference also characterizes Parrino’s drawings and collages; among the artifacts and images featured here is a variation on the logo of the comic book series “The Hulk”. Parrino pairs and juxtaposes such loaded cues with sketches and studies for paintings, using graphite, ink, and tape—as well as more surprising materials such as engine enamel and glitter vinyl—to stand in for the substantive components of larger works. Elsewhere, by spraying enamel onto sheets of crumpled vellum, he allows the textures of the support to determine structure and detail. Steven Parrino was born in New York in 1958. He received his BFA in 1982 from Parsons School of Design, New York. In the late seventies, he began attacking, slashing, tearing, and twisting the canvas, disrupting the traditional Greenbergian celebration of flatness. With an uncompromisingly nihilist attitude, Parrino in many ways mirrored the rebellions of the American punk music scene and subcultures, translating that chaotic spirit in his work. Despite the embrace of chaos, his keen awareness and understanding of modernism, semiotics, and the theoretical texts of minimalists such as Donald Judd and Frank Stella, awoke the possibilities of painting as an object or a real fact. Parrino’s multifarious interests – comic books, hot rods, noise music – are brought together in his practice and oeuvre. Parrino tragically died at the age of 46 in a motorcycle accident in January 2005.

Photo: Steven Parrino, The Self-Mutilation Bootleg 2 (The Open Grave), 1988/2003, enamel on canvas, in 2 parts, overall: 88 × 108 × 72 inches (223.5 × 274.3 × 182.9 cm), © Steven Parrino, Courtesy the Parrino Family Estate. Photo: Zarko Vijatovic

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, France, Duration: 31/3-28/5/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:30-18:30, https://gagosian.com