Schwarz
View current page
...more recent posts
correcting and adding to the record on : STEVEN PARRINO
Steve always had a neat studio. There was never a big storage closet full of older works. Although we were friends I never really caught him at work putting together those big scale piss elegant abstractions. I do know studio mates of his however who did spend time with him working who mentioned that he had a habit of either destroying, reusing (refucking-up) or painting over unsold pieces. Some of those canvas wads were old (often exceedingly successful ) stretcher pieces. Pieces in one show would be repainted, usually trending to black for the next show. I think he took a que and ran with it, as this is something (best friend and biker buddy) Olivier Mosset does too: repainting old pieces for new shows. This would suggest that there is precious little work(for someone with 37 solo shows) outside of the sold pieces. I'm hearing that Steve didn't keep much of a record of this process. That may make for something of a challenge in assembling his catalog raisonn'e. With any luck written and photographic gallery and museum records of works destroyed, transmuted and physically same (painted-repainted) paintings with different names, identities and meanings will form a convolutedly accurate history. I would hope that this important aspect is explored in Parrino's upcoming major survey show currently being planned by Geneva's Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain for October 2005.
note: Parrino's destruction of unsold paintings has a wholly different meaning from the destructive editing activities of precedential modernist's like de Kooning and Baldassari. This may have been fully obvious but is just dawning on me now, posthumously.
-Bill Schwarz