Vincent Desiderio. Recent Paintings

About

The show opens Tuesday November 26th, 2019 with a reception from 6:00-8:00 pm and will continue through December 21st. This will be Desiderio’s tenth show with Marlborough Gallery.

The exhibition features ten new oil on canvas works created over the past two years as well as several earlier creations. Paintings by Desiderio often play cognitive readings against optical clues. Whether a depiction of characters from the films of Pasolini, foreboding rocky landscapes, a sleeping child or sniper, the often cryptic narratives achieve a profound impact both visually and emotionally. Viewers get the sense that they are standing at the threshold of a dream.

The central painting in the show is a nearly 12-feet long horizontal canvas entitled Dead White. A masterwork two years in the making that began as an anamorphic depiction of death masks, the painting became a depiction of a distorted cathedral-like structure, one that is torn and burnt. It evinces catacombs and an obscured and degraded Italian altarpiece in equal measure. Desiderio says of the work, “I began to realize that the painting had become something of a monument to time itself.” Like most of the works in the exhibition, it exists in a poetic, in-between space where time and place are constantly shifting and logic is something mutable and arguably irrelevant.