Steven Parrino at Galerie Loevenbruck

Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was a modernist mannerist grasp with an intuition for annihilation. His graphic oeuvre, which brings something of the high energy of hardcore punk music to the delicacy of drawing, appears to hail from a missing golden age when an artist could however inhabit a mental house different from mainstream pop tradition. Loevenbruck’s modest batch of is effective on paper from 1989 onward emphasize Parrino’s melancholy aesthetic and one of a kind sensibility, which mingled the cynical with the transcendent.

Parrino, who arrived of age in a late-1970s artwork scene dominated by the rhetoric about the dying of portray, was fascinated in historical reference, not abstraction. As with many of the artists involved with Gallery Character Morte, the 1980s-era neo-Conceptualist East Village haunt where he 1st showed, Parrino commenced actively playing with insincere signifiers that he finally came to enjoy. In his graphic perform, a semiotic suspicion, regular with Guy Debord’s Culture of the Spectacle—from which Parrino nicked a phrase for his 2003 reserve, No Text—took on a form of subdued hysteria. Parrino relished the confrontations that could be developed by injecting campy elements into critical large-art and/or punk references. The black rectangle in Black Flag, 2003, which appropriates and rotates a kitsch drawing Raymond Pettibon built for a Black Flag band flyer, can be study as a Pierre Soulages canvas. Apart from the evident nod to Malevich’s well known 1915 portray, the black square in Untitled, 2003, also indicates La Monte Young’s Black Album document cover from 1969. By means of these nested references, Parrino manufactured it obvious that an artist does not perform in a vacuum, but in a area of lifeless clichés.

— Joseph Nechvatal