The Work

My minimal and abstract. I like to work beyond standard expectations of presentation and access. I have been making and showing work since the 80s, steeped in theories of postmodernism and beyond. This has left me with a healthy disrespect for authority in art.

I am interested in using the most common materials. Gouache, graphite, tape, paper, cardboard. Drawing and painting is my way of reaching an abstract visual language inspired by painters like Reinhardt and Martin.  The viewer looking at my work should be suspended in a place between painting and drawing, and will have to do their homework.  The structure of the small works references the visual plane of a prayer book dedicated to orphans, c.1930, hand-made by my grandfather. The work is intentionally frameless, floating, and transient.  Language, word play, and the responsibility to choose one's words carefully are found in titles of the works with ideas expressed in Italian, Latin, and English. 

Since October 2023, within the form I have described, my work is now a visual language addressing the Palestine/Israel conflict.  In February 2024, a little over a year into the conflict, a week before I was to talk on my work, a deeper translation of my grandfather's prayer book revealed ephemera c. 1948, from the Franciscan publication, Crusader's Almanac.  The Almanac contained a Vatican request for prayers of peace for orphans and refugees of the Nakba. 

Time is powerful. It is not linear, it is spiral. It intersects, weaves, and communicates through lineages. My work responds to a current genocide taking place in the same location that Salvatore Carucci, a contadino, from the Potenza Valley in Italy, prayed for in 1948. He and I are speaking through time.  Our realities are fused, adding our voices to a history of many who recognize the necessity of individual liberation for a peaceful existence.