Marco Pariani

"Cheim & Read is pleased to present Marco Pariani: Trees and Traditions, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by the Brooklyn-based, Italian-born artist... The "trees and traditions" cited in the exhibition's title are Christmas trees and the decorating, gift-giving, and family gatherings traditionally associated with the holiday. Casting an ironic eye on the stress, materialism, and forced good cheer endemic to the season, Pariani focuses on the inflatable decorations that bloom across suburban lawns and town squares as the holiday approaches. However, the artist never directly quotes the appearance of these oversized ornaments, whose images he has downloaded from the internet. His canvases -- teeming with sprayed dots and lines, embossed textures, oil stick slashes, and brushy, agitated paint strokes -- occupy a fluctuating, ambiguous space between figuration and abstraction. Pariani might take a color from one screenshot and a shape from another, gleaning ideas from as many as a dozen sources at a time. His compositions reflect both the instability and the simultaneity of the internet, where images crowding the screen flit in and out of sight with the click of a mouse.The new paintings are enriched by intaglio patterns along the borders of the canvas to suggest an ornamental frame enclosing, though not quite harnessing, the wildness of the painted image...Pariani moved to Brooklyn from his native Italy in 2019 to be closer to the contemporary American artists he admires, and his calligraphic lines and expressive strokes mine the history of American modernism as much as his compositions mine the imagistic glut of the internet." -- Host institution's website, viewed September 23, 2024.