Steven Parrino cycle Thousand and three plates, fifth episode Rétrospective 1977-2004 of February 22, 2006 to May 7, 2006 The work of Steven Parrino constitutes, over almost three decades, a vital bond with the principle (prétenduement obsolete) of "radicality". At the beginning of the years 1980, whereas the public sentence proclaimed the death of painting, S. Parrino, rather than to join to the funeral, took the party of the "nécrophilie". Between its hands, the techniques resulting from the appropriation were done punishable, a means for him of incarnating in a convulsive way historical collapse of the account of the avant-gardes. Not to project an outdistanced image of this ideological failure, but to work rough visual matérialisation of its effects. Neither nostalgic nor cynical, its ruffled monochromic paintings, its films and performances, its photocollages and work on paper realized with materials also in charge of direction which can be to it the industrial enamel, blood or the spangles, proceed more of black paintings of Frank Stella and of its creed "what you see is what you see" that of any post-pop tradition of cultural criticism. And still, let us specify, not any blackboards of Stella, but more specifically of "Arbeit macht frei" (1958) and "Die Fahne Hoch" (1959). With the eyes of S. Parrino, these fabrics were not "black" for nothing... For the black of Stella, it is still necessary to add the money of the tables of disaster of Warhol (1963). Just like the ruffled monochromic fabrics of the artist, which evoke the body of a car after an accident, the "figurative" drawings of S. Parrino adapting images resulting from subcultures ' biker', ' No-wave' and punk, comic strip or cuffs of tabloïds, are as much of "obvious signs of a cold been useful violence" (Robert Nickas). Contrary to works of its Californian counterparts (such as for example Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw or Raymond Pettibon), those of S. Parrino do not reveal as well the impulses and the hidden myths of America, as they do not marry infinitely plastic surface of it - "not-sites" voluntarily animals, glamour and without recall of the ideals of the counter-culture. "the radicality comes from the context and not necessarily of the form, writing S. Parrino. The forms are radical in the memory, while perpetuating what was radical formerly by the extension of their history. The avant-garde leaves a wake and, driven by a force mannerist, it continues his advance. Even in the escape, we look over our shoulder and rather approach art by intuition than by strategy. Seen under this angle, art is more worship than culture " Fabrice Stroun Steven Parrino was born in 1958 in New York, it is deceased in 2005.