A rock’n’roll punch to the picture plane: Steven Parrino’s N.Y.C. H.C. F.T.W.

William Jobling examines a striking example of the New York artist’s rock’n’roll aesthetic 

With its glossy, crumpled black surface draped across a stretcher frame, N.Y.C. H.C. F.T.W. (New York City Hard Core Fuck The World) (1995) is a hard-hitting example of Steven Parrino’s iconic ‘misshaped paintings’.

Born in New York in 1958, Parrino lived and breathed hardcore. He played in several downtown noise bands. In one work, titled Guitar Grind (1995), he dragged his bass against an electric guitar, making the two instruments scream through the amplifiers. For the 2001 installation 13 Shattered Panels (for Joey Ramone), he sledgehammered slabs of black plasterboard in tribute to one of his heroes.

The artist’s rebel mystique has only increased since his death in 2005, aged 46, in a late-night motorbike crash.

In tune with his musical influences, Parrino found creative potential in disruption and destruction. Blending cool formalism with a distinctly counterculture aesthetic, he tore, crushed and folded his paintings to transform them into radical, sculptural objects.

Steven Parrino (1958-2005), N.Y.C. H.C. F.T.W. (New York City Hardcore Fuck the World), 1995. Oil and enamel on canvas. 22 x 30⅛ in (56 x 76.5 cm). Sold in private sale. View post-war and contemporary art currently offered for private sale

N.Y.C. H.C. F.T.W., painted in oil and enamel on slack canvas, appears to have been grabbed and twisted: a central square of black is torqued to the right, dripping in all directions and seemingly dragging its surrounding swathes of raw canvas out from behind the stretcher bars.

The title’s initials are tagged, graffiti-style, at the black zone’s top left. Its leather-jacket-black folds lend the work a muscular force in keeping with its punk-rock title, even as it nods to the austere language of monochrome Minimalism. The effect is at once lush and nihilistic, rakish and coolly serious.

Writing in New York  magazine, Jerry Saltz observed that Parrino’s violent attacks upon the taut canvas of painterly tradition were ultimately born of love for his medium.

‘Parrino didn’t want to annihilate painting,’ revealed the critic. ‘He came of age, he said, when “the word on painting was ‘Painting is Dead.’ I saw this as an interesting place for painting… and this death painting thing led to a sex and death painting thing… that became an existence thing”.

‘All this sounds bad-boy and romantic,’ continued Saltz, ‘but that “existence thing” at the end is crucial. He vividly demonstrates that no matter what you do to a canvas — slash, gouge, twist or mutilate it — you can’t actually kill it.’

‘I could pull and contort the material and reattach it to the stretcher, in effect mis-stretching the painting, altering the state of the painting’ — Steven Parrino

Works like N.Y.C. H.C. F.T.W.  take up a long tradition of ‘destroying the painting’ that has its roots in mid-century Italy, from Lucio Fontana’s slashed Spatialist canvases to the burnt Arte Povera works of Alberto Burri and Piero Manzoni’s pleated, fossilised ‘Achromes’.

They engage, too, with the Sixties philosophy of arch-Minimalist Donald Judd, who demanded a severe art of ‘specific’ and ‘aggressive’ objecthood, while also echoing the seductive crushed automobile sculptures of John Chamberlain and the muscle-car ‘Hoods’ of Parrino’s contemporary Richard Prince, who shared his interest in the vernacular of American subcultures.

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Like Prince, and like other ‘Neo-Geo’ and Appropriation artists of 1980s New York, Parrino wanted to break down the barrier between life and art. Rupturing the pristine illusions of the picture plane with a rock’n’roll punch, he ultimately saw his works as a mode of realism.

‘By unstretching the canvas,’ he explained, ‘I could pull and contort the material and reattach it to the stretcher, in effect mis-stretching the painting, altering the state of the painting. 

‘The painting was, in a sense, deformed. This mutant form of deformalised painting gave me a chance to speak about reality through abstract painting, to speak about life.’

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