Before (Plus ou moins)

"One passes through the last fifty years of American culture in the work of Steven Parrino, from the hipsters, hot rods, grotesque queens and bikers of the 1940s/50s to the hippies, Harleys, porn stars and punks of the 60s/70s, to their re-emergence today." (Robert Nickas) Borrowing from all forms of American culture (bikers, super heroes, punk music, horror films, etc.), the art of Steven Parrino retains a strong link with the history of modern art, in particular the post-war American avant-garde. The sources of Parrino’s œuvre – its expressive strength, its constantly unfolding drama, its chromatic radicalism, the extreme violence of its destructive power – appear in the works of artists such as Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson and many others. His fetishized colours, black and silver, are the colours of Harley Davidsons, guitar amplifiers, sunglasses (which Parrino used to wear even at night), but also those of Frank Stella’s paintings or of the steel or industrial paint used by Donald Judd.

Steven Parrino’s approach in his search for a realist painting, conceived as a real object or fact, can be interpreted as a new form of "realism", in the tradition of post-war American artists. "Realism has been redefined since Courbet, from representing the reality of the day to defining the object in the real world, real time. Subjectivity is selection (the clean edit) and does not deal with the melodramas of fantasy, just the facts," Parrino used to say. The artist chose to draw his inspiration from his predecessors in order to give painting a new direction at the most critical moment, when everyone was proclaiming its death.

Before (plus ou moins) brings together some key pieces in the formation of Steven Parrino’s aesthetic universe. Composed of historical works from the 1960s and 1970s – like Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair series, a monochrome stainless steel piece from Donald Judd’s Progression series (made among other things with Harley Davidson’s lacquered paint), the video Claim Excerpts by Vito Acconci, or the videos Rundown and Swamp by Robert Smithson, but also Sturtevant’s Stella Black Paintings or Kenneth Anger’s film Invocation of My Demon Brother – Before (plus ou moins) maps out a landscape of multiple, intertwined influences that highlights Parrino’s fascination with the monochrome, his regular use of reappropriation and his conception of the work of art as a surface for projection and free association.

Vito Acconci, Kenneth Anger, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Sturtevant, Andy Warhol.

Before (Plus ou moins)

mit Vito Acconci, Kenneth Anger, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella, Elaine Sturtevant, Andy Warhol