Steven Parrino
Active from the late 1970s until his untimely death in a motorbike accident in 2005, Steven Parrino was a painter and musician, whilst also working in video and performance art. Having arrived on the New York art scene at a time when painting had been declared ‘dead’, he adopted a method he described as ‘necrophilic’ to continue exploring the medium of painting and breathe new life into it, by pushing its boundaries and possibilities. Parrino blurred the traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture, and between low and high culture.
From 1981 onwards, he developed three series of monochrome paintings in parallel: the Bent paintings, the Slot paintings and, most famously, the Misshaped canvases. The three series differ in the nature of their supports: corrugated cardboard, slightly bent, for the Bent series; square or rectangular formats, always perforated, for the Slot series; and, for the third series, canvases that have been crumpled and altered through manipulation. Alongside these monochrome panels, he practised drawing and collage, in which his references to popular culture became explicit – comic books, television series, hot rods, bikers, B-movies, and science-fiction and horror films.
Although Parrino’s influences are varied, and at times disparate, the artist asserts that his works are exclusively pictorial in nature, even when they are unframed and left lying on the floor. The forcefulness of his brushwork on the canvas and its effects liberate these canvases from the minimalist and conceptual legacy of a certain type of monochrome painting, encouraging a broader vision.
