This beautiful painting is made of

Result #1

This beautiful painting is made of five tiny paper cups—flower, calla, and pinkies—spent with liquid plaster. Each cup is decorated with a plastic gold-glitter-like construction and the most delicate of gold-grain vignettes. They are garnished with a penciled gold locket and laid out on the floor, a paper cup for a chalice and a small library card. The resulting picture is almost a ghost painting in its origami effect. It suggests that a small folded paper cup might be just as precious as a small gold-lipped gold bean. (Of course, the cup is empty, but for a cup of tea or a little silver cup in a pocket.)When I first saw it I was told that the artist made a picture of the house of the cup; I wondered if it was possible to find a place of such refined luxury and elegance as this. So I went to visit the studio and found that the artist had taken the cup of tea and an umbrella to the studio. Now the cup was in the studio and the umbrella was out of the studio, in the courtyard. I asked the artist if he had thought of such a creative use of gold for figurative relief and he said he had. Now I looked into the studio and discovered a golden-glitter placard that had been taken to the studio. I asked the artist about the gold cups and he said they were the most beautiful cup he had ever had. He then said he had been asked to paint one on the workbench and that the gold felt hat was the most treasured object in the studio. I asked him to explain how he got the gold cups and he said the artist had asked him to paint them. I asked him what the hat and the gold-glitter designs meant and he said the hat was a German term for a gold-covered dog.

Result #2

This beautiful painting is made of a series of spatial images of a transposed human form. The images are no longer the same ones the viewer recognizes, but they seem to have been shifted from the negative to the positive. In fact, the entire painting was created through a series of transformations, a process of decantation and absorption, from the familiar to the disconcerting. This process was especially apparent in the showroom of the Fondazione Morra Negativo in Rome, where one could observe the artists journey in the museum. From the walls, a video showed a fluid stream of images as it passed over and over a gigantic mezzanine, which became the temporary resting area for a huge poster of Luciano Del Gaudio, who, in 1980, was involved with a series of suicides. In the video, the artist is shown in a wheelchair, and his voice speaks of the suicide of his companion, but what emerges from the sound of the other artists footsteps is a blurry vision, the result of the artists seizure and the shock that follows. The work and the video, as one might expect, are in tension with one another. The artist cannot be understood without the outside world, as he knows it; and yet, a deeper distance from the outside helps to make the work more intense and mysterious. It is only the absence of those outside that gives rise to these works.In the back room, a series of three-dimensional drawings. They were made by washing silk, paper, and thread with ink and oil paint; the drawing remains raw, as though the work had been held in the artists hand, but with a surface that is rough and rough for a canvas. This drawing becomes a sort of epilogue to the flow of the world, as if the most experienced artists have taken a permanent vacation from their fields and found themselves sitting in an outdoor hammock in a lake.

Result #3

This beautiful painting is made of acrylic in the usual manner of this century, but thickly and with a surface that is somewhat doughy, almost like a canvas made of bones. The oil paint, which is applied in thick rivulets, is applied in various ways, and the result looks as if it were being scraped and then stitched together. The unevenness and even fuzziness of the result suggest that there might be a spatial plane beyond the surface, a gestural dimension. The gesture of painting, in its various forms, which shifts from the sheer material to the two-dimensional plane, goes through a variety of gestures, all of which seem to correspond to the complexity of the gesture itself. In contrast to the coarseness of the gestures themselves, the texture of the oil paint lends an occasional warmth to the painted surface. In most instances, the oil paint is applied in thin vertical lines that resemble the vertical bands of the canvas. The paintings have a really great sense of depth. They have a feeling of spatial self-sufficiency, that seems to be the point. They are self-contained, created in response to the viewer. The more painterly there is, the better the paintings are; the works feel neither grisly nor apologetic, but rather like paintings made with a few strokes of paint and a different way of bringing the paint through the net. The result is of a richness of handling that suggests that the paintings are as much a response to their viewer as they are an expression of his or her response. However, in that response is implied not only by the paintings length, but also by the response of the viewer to these gestures. The viewer, again and again, is involved in a sort of ritual activity. In some sense, the paintings have the feeling of a traditional Sunday morning routine, a segment of a group gathering, a gathering of family and friends.

Result #4

translucent acrylic which forms different sections of the surface with varying intensities of gold leaf. The opacity of the surface enhances the evocation of shadow as well as of colored light. A peculiar darkness radiates from one section of the painting to the next. The surface itself is visually solid and the colors—in orange, yellow, pink, and green—are nonreflective. It is the combination of the translucency of paint and the illusiveness of shadow that makes this work interesting.For him, color is an extension of the craft, a means for expressing the qualities of the individual and for capturing the essence of a situation. Colors may be incorporated into painting, but in fact they are never not the work of a painter, for the colors reflect the light and create the illusion of depth that only color can perform.

Result #5

This beautiful painting is made of plastic, and presents a grotesque composition with three figures—a gang of six figures and a very large rectangular form. Of the six figures, two are women: one is a woman in the street, wearing a denim jacket with red stripes, and the other is a woman in a red skirt. The last of the figures is a black man. The artist has painted them with a scrawling brush and gouged some of the lines so that they create a tear in the plastic and the paint appears in an irregular, messy manner, like cigarette ash. The model is a young man, and, while wearing no clothes, appears as an enormous woman, with long legs and thick thighs and a perineal region that leads me to think of lots of female anatomy books. The whole composition is still very much in the realm of fantasies, but with a completely different quality. It is as if the two women were playing hide-and-seek with one another, with one of them reaching up and grabbing a hair from the others head. In this situation, their language is slightly different, but their image is the same. They appear to be in love with one another, but their gestures are awkward and their bodies are different. It is possible that this is a dream in the deepest sense. They are what Robert Rauschenberg called objects with a feeling, so strong that it might crush anyone who touched them.I wonder whether the work, which is more than ten feet tall, is really that big, and how much of it was gathered outdoors in the gallery. I know a lot of the six figures look so small—huge from a distance, and also because they are, well, small. One can imagine this on a scale of 10-by-14-inches or 1-by-1-inches—but even then, the figure would look smaller, because it seems so subdued. The audience is allowed to look at it, but not touch it.