NYAB Event - Vincent Desiderio Exhibition

Vincent Desiderio Exhibition

Marlborough (Midtown)

This event has ended.

Desiderio has earned a well-deserved reputation for artistic mastery and this show attests not only to a mastery of painting but also to his far ranging interests. As ARTnews pointed out, “As large as Vincent Desiderio’s oils on canvas are, their content is commensurate with their size.” If there is one word to describe his grand, sumptuously painted works it is perhaps enigmatic. The artist’s paintings are freewheeling panoramas of ideas, emotions, aesthetics, and historical narrative. In this show Desiderio’s keen observation ranges on subjects from film (Hitchcock’s Hands) and Boris Karloff (The Awful Indifference) to film noir and Italian Communism (Antonio Gramsci in Exodus) to the narrative pause of Ekphrasis, and to the erotically alive sculptures of an Indian temple (Transubstantiation and Three Acts of Defilement). Desiderio recently worked as the production designer on a feature film (Manhattan Undying), and in several of these paintings the juxtaposition of images acts like film montage. Another central theme coursing through these intriguing, complex paintings is the constancy of nature set against the absurdity and foibles of mankind. Several works feature stone statuary: the artist has focused on the heaviness of the images to emphasize a materialization of form and to comment on how some current social values have turned art into a kind of signage, or commodity. In Arts & Letters Maureen Mullarkey said, “Vincent Desiderio brings to the painting of the human figure a grace of hand, and rarer still, a grace of mind. Steeped in suggestion, his works are moral allegories. Realistically painted, his subjects assert the primacy of life over the painter’s world of forms.” One might add that it is the primacy of life that, ironically through the paintings of stone statuary, informs much of the core themes of this show. Desiderio emerged into the New York Art scene in the early 1980’s. His work had the immediate attention of critics who claimed his style as either “New History Painting” or “Neo-Intimist Painting”. Nancy Grimes in Art in America called him a “post-formalist representational painter,” and Donald Kuspit in his book, The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth Century, referred to Desiderio’s work as “Postmodern Visionary Painting:”

Media

• Painting
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