Steven Parrino at Galerie Loevenbruck

Steven Parrino (1958–2005) was a modernist mannerist learn with an intuition for annihilation. His graphic oeuvre, which brings some thing of the superior vitality of hardcore punk tunes to the delicacy of drawing, appears to be to hail from a misplaced golden age when an artist could even now inhabit a mental space independent from mainstream pop culture. Loevenbruck’s modest batch of performs on paper from 1989 onward highlight Parrino’s melancholy aesthetic and distinctive sensibility, which mingled the cynical with the transcendent.

Parrino, who came of age in a late-1970s artwork scene dominated by the rhetoric about the demise of portray, was intrigued lay in historical reference, not abstraction. As with numerous of the artists related with Gallery Mother nature Morte, the 1980s-era neo-Conceptualist East Village haunt wherever he initial showed, Parrino started participating in with insincere signifiers that he eventually came to enjoy. In his graphic do the job, a semiotic suspicion, regular with Dude Debord’s Modern society 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 made by injecting campy features into really serious superior-art and/or punk references. The black rectangle in Black Flag, 2003, which appropriates and rotates a kitsch drawing Raymond Pettibon created for a Black Flag band flyer, can be go through as a Pierre Soulages canvas. Moreover the obvious nod to Malevich’s well known 1915 painting, the black square in Untitled, 2003, also indicates La Monte Young’s Black Album document go over from 1969. By these nested references, Parrino manufactured it clear that an artist does not get the job done in a vacuum, but in a discipline of lifeless clichés.

— Joseph Nechvatal