Steven Parrino challenges the traditional role of canvas in painting. Looking back to the post-war avant-garde – notably artists who questioned the very nature of the painted surface such as Lucio Fontana or Piero Manzoni – Parrino’s canvases exude a resolutely anarchic sensibility that is entrenched in counterculture. Evoking the legacy of Manzoni and Fontana, Parrino makes the surface of painting the very subject of his art; and yet, unlike these Italian masters, his canvases are highly physical monochrome exaggerations executed in glossy Pop-art colours. Possessing a look that suggests the canvas has been wrestled, twisted and forced off its wooden support – with primed white edges and bare unprimed linen excess creeping onto the three-dimensional picture plane – Parrino’s painting perform the death throes of an artform that, by the late 1970s, had been declared defunct and obsolete. In his own words: "When I started making paintings, the word on painting was ‘PAINTING IS DEAD’. I saw this as an interesting place for painting... death can be refreshing, so I started engaging in necrophilia….. Approaching history in the same way that Dr. Frankenstein approaches body parts” (S. Parrino, The No Texts (1979-2003), New York 2003, p. 43). His works brought forth a new realism formed from the physical ruin of painting and its outdated currency as an expired traditionalist art form, and thus somewhat preempted the ‘zombie formalism’ that emerged after his untimely death in 2005.

The strained compositions of his so-called ‘misshapen paintings’ and their assigned titles, as in the present Sin City Sag. Fuckhead Bubble Gum, chime with the rebellious cultural backdrop of New York in the late 1970s and early ‘80s; a milieu fueled by gritty urban creativity that incubated the anarchic character of Parrino’s art. Indeed, born in New York in 1958, Parrino’s career began in the late 1970s with a series of impromptu performance pieces that possessed a distinctly nihilistic quality. From fifteen minutes of guitar feedback played at high-volume (Electric Guitar, 1979) through to smashing a TV set with a sledgehammer (Disruption, 1981) these pieces epitomise the rebellious and angst-driven force of his art; a quality that comes to bear on the surface of his paintings.

Stemming from a deep love and appreciation for Pop art and an impetus to show something of the violence and nihilism of New York counterculture, Parrino conceived his paintings as “realist and connected to real life” (Ibid., p. 23). While the offset square of the present work calls to mind the Suprematist squares of Kazimir Malevich or the colour field paintings of Frank Stella and Barnet Newman, Parrino’s contorted and excessive magenta canvas does not operate within an abstract formalist arena, but rather in “the social field, in brief: action. All my works deal with disturbing the status quo All my work deals with disrupting the status quo and the history of like disruptions- mainly focused on the USA between 1958 and the present time- my lifetime” (Ibid.). First exhibited in 1984 at Gallery Nature Morte in New York, these tremendously physical works blur the line between sculpture and painting, pushing the spatial and textural parameters of paint on canvas to their very limit.