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Lot Essay
This piece by Steven Parrino is a loud and brash example of the American artist and noise musician’s work reaching a visual crescendo. Executed at the pinnacle of his career, cut short by an untimely motorcycle accident in 2005, Untitled displays Parrino’s startling experiments in violently dislocated media. Parrino initiated his process by densely coating a bare canvas in blue acrylic paint, before convulsively yanking the material from its stretcher bars, so that the entire mass of material appears crumpled and billowed. The visual effect is akin to the pop experiments of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed (1955) or Claus Oldenberg’s canvas sculptures, where each artist moulded and manipulated the pronouncement of the canvas to make figurative and humorous works. However, Parrino’s practice is rooted in a necessity to continue the twentieth-century annulment of conventional painting, whilst expressively emblematising the artist’s radical personal attitudes.
By violating the very medium of painting, Parrino enters into an extensive modernist linearity of negating pictorial illusionism, non-flat abstraction and emotive chromatic schema. Returning to the core of artistic media some decades after Frank Stella questioned the shape of the support itself, Parrino proceeded to probe the very essence of flat abstraction. Whereas Stella worked on the flatness of the surface alone, here Parrino completely uproots it, propelling the exteriority of painting into a three-dimensional, atmosphere-shattering character, so that neither painting nor sculpture is securely defined. This destructive approach was infamously summarised by Parrino in one of his ‘NO’ texts. ‘When I started making paintings,’ Parrino roared, ‘the word on painting was PAINTING IS DEAD. I saw this as an interesting place for painting … death can be refreshing, so I started engaging in necrophilia … approaching history in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein approaches body parts’ (S. Parrino, The No Texts, New Jersey, 2003, p. 43). This macabre attitude reflects an artist engrossed in ‘post-punk existentialism’, and is visually reflected in works such as the present lot, which distils Parrino’s distinctly aggressive intervention, so that his rapid performative action is captured and suspended in time and form (ibid.).
By violating the very medium of painting, Parrino enters into an extensive modernist linearity of negating pictorial illusionism, non-flat abstraction and emotive chromatic schema. Returning to the core of artistic media some decades after Frank Stella questioned the shape of the support itself, Parrino proceeded to probe the very essence of flat abstraction. Whereas Stella worked on the flatness of the surface alone, here Parrino completely uproots it, propelling the exteriority of painting into a three-dimensional, atmosphere-shattering character, so that neither painting nor sculpture is securely defined. This destructive approach was infamously summarised by Parrino in one of his ‘NO’ texts. ‘When I started making paintings,’ Parrino roared, ‘the word on painting was PAINTING IS DEAD. I saw this as an interesting place for painting … death can be refreshing, so I started engaging in necrophilia … approaching history in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein approaches body parts’ (S. Parrino, The No Texts, New Jersey, 2003, p. 43). This macabre attitude reflects an artist engrossed in ‘post-punk existentialism’, and is visually reflected in works such as the present lot, which distils Parrino’s distinctly aggressive intervention, so that his rapid performative action is captured and suspended in time and form (ibid.).