Back in the 1980s, I got to know Steven Parrino (1958–2005) and became a fan of his work. He was enamored with sex, drugs and rock & roll, a passion reflected in an aggressively punk formula that involved tacking large pieces of cotton duck to smaller stretcher frames and applying a single color in enamel. The canvases were then detached from their supports and rucked this way and that before being stapled back into place. What had been pristine monochromes now looked like unmade beds.
Parrino transformed the shaped-canvas genre from a noun to a verb, while harkening back to the 1960s and ’70s, when the medium had been pronounced dead and Minimalism ruled the roost. Indeed, his pieces look as if they were assaulted by someone affronted by the very notion of painting.
Parrino’s career was something of a mixed bag: Appreciated in Europe, he couldn’t even get arrested in NYC. All that changed after his death, when a 2007 show at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue gallery pushed the prices of his pieces to the $1 million mark.
This new pocket survey of his work also takes place in a swanky Upper East Side space. The elegant setting dims the ferocity of Parrino’s paintings, though not their appeal. More resistant to taming are photomontages that reveal the violent subtext of the paintings by juxtaposing S&M porn, tabloid headlines and gruesome images of mutilated bodies.
Parrino reduced Expressionism to adolescent aggro, suggesting that it had always been thus. Yet there was also something sweetly naive about his efforts. I’m not sure what he would have made of his revival, but I suspect he would’ve appreciated the money.