“Jackie Saccoccio: Interrupted Grid,” Eleven Rivington, New York, NY. Through Feb. 9.
“Carolanna Parlato: Nature Games,” Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, NY. Through Feb. 2.
In the NY Sun, Stephen Maine reports that art is work, but these painters seem to have a good time doing it. “Now on view, two exuberant solo shows by accomplished, mid-career New York painters convey the pleasure they take in their very different approaches to materials and application. Jackie Saccoccio and Carolanna Parlato have been on their game long enough to know that the kind of statement they’re looking to make arises not from the pursuit of novelty but from a focused and personal engagement with postwar abstraction, a kind of call-and-response with pictorial precedent. Both retool gestural abstraction � ‘painterly painting’ � with hard-won self-assurance. That the still-expanding contemporary art market makes a place at the table for such an (until recently) unhip idiom inspires optimism.” Read more.
In the Gay City News, Stephen Mueller writes that Saccoccio’s extensive knowledge of the history of Western painting and its mechanics in the modernist movement informs her work. “Saccoccio proceeds to disrupt the picture plane either by continually contradicting space or by defining it. Her work calls to mind painters from Italian mannerist masters to Joan Mitchell to contemporaries like Louise Fishman, but with a fresher palette with less depictive chroma. Saccoccio’s color can be difficult. Compositionally she uses what Hans Hoffman refers to as ‘push and pull,’ an approach that ties abstract painting to Renaissance spatial conceits. It’s fun to watch Saccoccio’s work dance around the modernist canon, which denies spatial concerns to abstract painting.” Read more.
