Civilization and the Landscape of Discontent   |   Still Life With Transaction   |   Natural Genre   |   The New Capital   |   Final Love   |   Paravision   |   Persona Non Grata   |   Cult and Decorum   |   Time After Time (A Sculpture Show)   |   Spiritual America   |   Ultrasurd   |   Modern Sleep   |   The Antique Future   |   Extreme Order   |   The Ironic Sublime   |   The New Poverty   |   Media Post Media   |   A Deer Manger, A Dress Pattern, Farthest Sea Water, and a Signature   |   Off White   |   Art at the End of the Social   |   Hybrid Neutral   |   Primary Forms, Mediated Structures   |   Pre-Pop Post-Appropriation   |   Buena Vista   |   The Last Laugh   |   A Curatorial Project   |   The Last Decade   |   Sal Scarpitta   |   All Quiet on the Western Front?   |   Who Framed Modern Art or the Quantitative Life of Roger Rabbit   |   Outside America   |   A New Low   |   New Era Space   |   Sal Scarpitta   |   Theoretically Yours   |   Who’s Afraid of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Passport Photography?   |   Needlepoint, Embroidery, Macrame, and Crochet   |   Donna Moylan   |   Meg Webster   |   Charles Clough   |   Elvis Has Left the Building (A Painting Show)   |   Julian Trigo   |   Vik Muniz   |   Claudia Zemborain   |   Sandro Chia   |   Alessandro Twombly   |   Lawrence Carroll   |   Peter Halley   |   A Fistful of Flowers   |   Across the River and into the Trees (A Sculpture Show)   |   Peter Halley   |   Bill Rice   |   Elliot Schwartz   |   Michel Frère   |   Realism After Seven A.M.   |   Malcolm Morley   |   The Evergreen Review Art Auction and Exhibition   |   Barney & Joan   |   Abraham David Christian   |   One Painting, Two Sculptures, Three-Hundred Photographs   |   Saint Clair Cemin   |   Robert Longo   |   Alex Katz   |   Ross Bleckner   |   David Salle   |   Mark Innerst   |   William Anastasi   |   Mimmo Paladino   |   Peter Nagy   |   The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications Critique and Culture   |   Skewed: Ruminations on the Writings and Works of Peter Halley, with New Paintings by the Artist  |   The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s  |   A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures  |   Franco Fontana, 1961-2017  |   Pizzi Cannella: Night Owl, 2014-2022   |    Nostalgia for Scandal: The ‘Not’ Paintings, Sculptures, Works of Paper of Mike Bidlo

Richard Milazzo’s essay, “Malcolm Morley: The Art of the Superreal, the Rough, the Neo-Classical, and the Incommensurable,” in this exhibition catalogue, Malcolm Morley: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings, Sculptures, analyzes many of the most seminal paintings the artist executed from 1958 to 1998, as well as all of the sculptures and several of the watercolors and drawings. Written old school style, this monograph closely scrutinizes the relation between the artist’s life and work. He examines the two post-World War II art movements that Malcolm Morley founded – the Superrealism of the 1960’s and 1970’s and the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980’s –, as well as the most recent work of the 1990’s, which the author contends is a synthesis of the first two bodies of work and identifies as ‘Neo-Classical’.

The author analyzes these three periods through his theory of the incommensurable which attempts to locate and explain — and which reflects Morley’s own efforts to explore — the discrepancies existing between the artist’s subconscious and his well-known grid technique. The author shows that it is precisely the ‘mistakes’ or ‘slip-ups’ generated by the libido of the individual in conflict with the ‘superego’ or overriding rational systems of art and history that result in the visionary blindness of the artist. He writes: “What all the phases of Malcolm Morley’s life and work have in common are the boats – whether the giant ocean liners of his Superrealist paintings or the more modest sail and ‘life’ boats of his Neo-Expressionist works; and, in a sense, they can all be related to the toy model, H.M.S. Nelson, he lost as a child in World War II. All the subsequent boats can be viewed as a reenactment of the painful loss of innocence or as an excruciating separation and ultimate loss of this beloved mother ship or object of desire. Combined with the adulterations of later life, it can be seen that the artist has spent his whole life recuperating from the trauma of this symbolic loss.” Traveling timelessly and relentlessly through a Cézanne-like space – which “becomes more dimensional the more it is flattened” – to salvage his symbolic, beloved ‘Rosebud’ from the wreck of History, Morley rediscovers at the end what he already knew at the beginning: that this ‘object’ is lodged ultimately, deeply, forever in the port soul of his art.

According to the author, Malcolm Morley tried from the very beginning to fill symbolically the holes of his existence – from the bombed-out wall in his bedroom during the war (which destroyed his toy boat) to the hole literally under the kitchen sink which he could not repair or fill during his first job after he got out of prison, to the break-ins and prison cells (that were his first ‘studios’), to the portholes, fissures, and folds in his paintings. In the spirit of Cézanne (and Barnett Newman), Morley becomes perversely a defender of the illusionism of painting through its materic values (flatness, as well as facture), even as he battles against personal and social disillusionment and struggles for the mythic or primitive and the tragic or ‘slip-up’ over the binding super-structural ideas and ideologies of art and society, among which he counts the ‘grid’ both as a technique in his work that he favors and as the preeminent symbolic mode of rationality that he persistently questions. Where family, religion, ideology, and even beauty are found to be wanting, or even corrupt, as values, Morley asserts instead the experience of transformation as a mode of outer and inner transcendence or “deeper unexpectedness.” The artist, as a blind man, can he as such perhaps dream in colors and forms never before glimpsed?

At the end of this long essay, Richard Milazzo asks and answers the following questions: “Is the figure with blank, green eyes or sunglasses who dominates the scene [in Aegean Crime], Oedipus, who unknowingly kills his father, sleeps with his mother, and then plucks out his own eyes in retribution? Or is he the blind man Malcolm Morley encountered as a young boy of five or six long ago along the boardwalk in a seaside town on the English Channel in 1930’s? Is the crime blindness – the artist’s, ours, the universe’s? Do the green eyes or sunglasses reflect the enormous incommensurability of the cosmos itself or are they transparent to the cosmos as a rhetorical figure, waiting to be re-invented at the drop of a coin in a blind man’s tin cup? Where civilization could once transform the blind man into a prophet or a visionary, can culture now only convert vision into blindness, tragedy into bathos, and the unconscious itself into a form of kitsch? So what is it in the end that blocks our view, and makes us see only what we want to see in the heart of man – murder or some other unspeakable crime? I think people subconsciously want to see this dark thing in Morley because of what they actually see there – a radically uncompromised practice that will stop at nothing, that will acknowledge no boundary, to achieve its end. They want to see Caravaggio’s misdeeds in Morley because what they really want to see is a form or level of painting that is as defiant and definite in our time as Caravaggio’s was in his. And this is just another way to get to it.” In the end, this is precisely what the author argues they get in the artist’s work.

The Paintings of Ross Bleckner is the first monograph on the artist covering thirty years of his work, from 1976 to 2006. About the book, the author Richard Milazzo writes: “The work has always been interested in bringing abstract painting closer to the realities of the external world, while endeavoring to plumb the depths of the subliminal realm of the psyche. Much lauded for the work Bleckner has done for ACRIA, the American Community Research Institute Initiative on AIDS, and as an outspoken advocate of the fight against the disease since the late 1980s, his paintings are symbolic expressions of a larger humanity, and, as such, also comprise formal as well as social values.”

Further, he explains: “Bleckner’s work can be appreciated also for its ‘non-signature qualities – for his independent-mindedness and his willingness and ability to change the ‘look’ of his paintings whenever he has seen fit to do so, something he has done relentlessly since the very beginning of his career in the 1970s. So, rather than commence where his retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York left off, in 1995, this book traces the development of the artist’s work through all its various phases, and tries to show, with the greatest possible detail, its multifaceted nature.”

The monograph begins with an analysis of Bleckner’s much overlooked Constructivist and Post-Constructivist paintings of the 1970s. It continues with chapter by chapter studies of all the series: the Stripe, Weather, Chandelier, and Memorial (or AIDS) paintings of the early to mid-1980s; the Post-Memorial or Stripe paintings reprised, the Unknown Quantities of Light, the Knight/Night and Architecture of the Sky series of the mid- to late 1980s; the Examined Life and Flower paintings of the early to mid-1990s; the Dream and Do, Cell and DNA works of the mid- to late 1990s; and the Specific and Anonymous, Inheritance, Protein, and Meditation paintings of the New Millennium.

Whether they are motivated by the brutal realism of the Cell paintings, the faint hope implicit in the Protein series, or the contemplative qualities of the new Meditation paintings, these images fly, and fall, like Icarus, through the divine vaults of humanity to the great ‘oculus’ or void at their very center: they are nothing, these works, if they do not examine mortality as the extreme expression of art. As another writer put it, it is “death as the ultimate artistic expression” that is at stake here. And this falling, is it not a “stepping into the eternal” – the ultimate groundlessness of the transcendent?

In addition to the intensive analysis of each of the works, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner contains 250 black and white illustrations, 134 color plates of Bleckner’s most seminal works, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, and a complete bibliography.

The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner by Richard Milazzo is the most comprehensive study of the artist’s work since the author’s monograph, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, was published in Brussels in 2007, and since the catalogue for Bleckner’s retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1995.

“Why analyze the floral portion of Bleckner’s work,” the author asks, “considering the diversity of his vision and his non-signature style? Because they become a primary and recursive part of his work, and because he sees the flower as the figure that most closely embodies the relation between mortality and the human condition. It is this ‘figure,’ perhaps even more than his infamous stripes, cells and birds, that will come to exemplify the relation between darkness and light, abstraction and figuration, and ultimately, epitomize the psychological object of desire, the flower’s fragility and transience, as such, appealing most of all to him.”

The flowers in Bleckner’s work have always been, from the very beginning, a ‘vehicle’ to explore this object or ‘tenor’ of transformation. The metaphor at work in the paintings is that of mortality, and the working method, that of methodological and metaphysical doubt. From the early ‘still lifes’ and sublime ‘landscapes’ of the Constructivist and Suprematist period, from 1976 to 1983, to the subtlest or symbolic, and sometimes kitsch, functions of the Memorial (or Commemoration) paintings and the Examined Life series, from 1985 to 1991; from the expressive immediacy of the classical Flower or Hothouse paintings, including the Yellow and Black series, from 1992 to 1997, to the lyrical and ‘documentary’ continuities of the Cell-influenced Inheritance paintings of the new millennium, from 2003 to 2006; from the more structural and spiritual continuities of the Meditation paintings to the rawest of temporalities in the most recent floral series, the Time (or Clock) paintings, from 2006 to 2010, “flowers have functioned basically within the context of a transformational ethos.”

In Bleckner’s art, the evolution of the flower will follow a very specific trajectory: depending upon light as a source of energy (photosynthesis), they (the ‘organisms’ or objects of desire) will manifest themselves as pure forms or streams of light (the stripes), evolve into light sources (chandeliers and stars) that will transform themselves into flowers, and then, into cells, and later, into abstract or floral forms of light. The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner documents a journey that will carry us through the late works of such artists as Goya, Turner, Monet, de Kooning, and especially, the last flower paintings of Manet, as well Velásquez, Sargent, Malevich, Nolde, Mondrian, Guston, Burchfield, O’Keeffe, Mitchell, Smithson, and such contemporaries, as Twombly, Marden and Kiefer, to the very heart of Bleckner’s work.

Peter Nagy: Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present by Richard Milazzo is the first monograph on the artist-dealer. The monograph grew out of a related exhibition the author curated at EISBox Projects, an independent space, in Brooklyn, New York, in April 2011. Where the exhibition focused on the first presentation of all of Nagy’s Xerox works from 1982 to 1984, accompanied by a limited selection of Cancer, Baroque and Rococo, and early Orientalist Paintings, the monograph compiles all, and analyses most, of the artist’s extant works from 1982 to 2004, including the Color Paintings he made in India, where the artist has lived and worked since 1992.

The author discusses also the history of Nagy’s fabled East Village gallery, Nature Morte, within the wider context of the art and culture of the 1980s, and the avant-garde role it continues to play in the world of contemporary art in India today. By the time the artist closed the gallery in New York in 1988, he had created several significant bodies of work, beyond the early Xeroxes: the Cancer Paintings of 1985 and 1986, which addressed through the use of abstraction the ‘cancer’ of global consumption; the metallic works of 1987, which commented on the negative aspects of the technological ‘revolution’; and the Baroque and Rococo Paintings of 1988 and 1989, which appropriated architectural motifs to generate a visionary form of critique in painting. With the Orientalist Paintings of the 1990s, with such series as the Self-Portraits and A Soft History of Imhotep, and his Color Paintings, stupas, and installations, the author elucidates how the artist moved from his earliest utilization of maps, floor plans, and architectural citations and from an American and European vision to a wider global ethos that included Asian or Middle East and Far Eastern cultures. Even as Nagy continued to work as an artist, he reopened Gallery Nature Morte in India, in 1997, to exhibit again the revolutionary art of his time and in the new millenium, this time half way around the world, and begins to work also as a curator and a writer on its behalf.

From his earliest 8½ x 11 in. Xeroxes to his Postmodern ‘altars,’ from his use of collage and montage, the techniques of miniaturization and magnification, to his use of extreme forms of abstraction, synchronicity, heterogeneity, contradiction, complexity and hybridization, critically reflecting the global culture and economy, the corporate Spectacle, all around him, the author shows how Nagy has formulated throughout his oeuvre a unique aesthetic. Like the exhibition, Peter Nagy: Entertainment Erases History – Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present discloses how the paintings, and the work, in general, moved from appropriation to abstraction to a combined use of both methodologies to create overall a body of work that remains unprecedented to this day.

In addition to an intensive, chapter-by-chapter analysis of each individual work and each period, this 480-page monograph contains 291 black and white illustrations, 129 black and white and 45 color reproductions of Nagy’s most seminal works, a timeline, a comprehensive history of his works and exhibitions, and a complete bibliography.

On the occasion of EXPO MODENA 2015, Modena City Council, with the patronage of Region Emilia-Romagna in collaboration with APT Servizi srl and Confindustria Modena, presented an international exhibition of contemporary art, The Mannequin of History: Art After Fabrications of Critique and Culture, curated by Richard Milazzo, and taking place at MATA, the newly renovated Manifattura Tabacchi building which will function as a new cultural center in the future, in Modena, Italy, from September 18, 2015 to January 31, 2016. The exhibition was accompanied by a major book of theory and criticsm.

The exhibition and book included 48 artists from 11 countries (Italy, Libya, Great Britain, Switzerland, Panama, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Iran, China, and America): William Anastasi, Donald Baechler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Carlo Benvenuto, Ross Bleckner, Alighiero e Boetti, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Gregory Crewdson, Enzo Cucchi, Gino De Dominicis, Nicola De Maria, Urs Fischer, Nan Goldin, Felix González-Torres, Andreas Gursky, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Mark Innerst, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Louise Lawler, Annette Lemieux, Robert Longo, Allan McCollum, Malcolm Morley, Vik Muniz, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Luigi Ontani, Mimmo Paladino, Richard Prince, Thomas Ruff, David Salle, Salvo, Mario Schifano, Julian Schnabel, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe, Wolfgang Tillmans, Franco Vaccari, Meg Webster, Chen Zhen.

In a chapter by chapter analysis, the critic and curator Richard Milazzo discusses in detail each of the artists’ contribution to the exhibition and their work in general. In the course of his analysis he argues that “art has been turned into a spectacle, not only by the auction houses, art fairs, commercial galleries, museums, collectors and corporate consortiums, but also by the critics, curators (myself included), and the media, in general, and, to a certain extent, by the artists themselves. Art, as a result, within this spectacle, has been turned into a mannequin.

“In Goya’s cartoon for the tapestry, The Straw Mannikin (1791-92), the figure is tossed into the air by the celebrants, four maidens, holding a blanket. The pretext is a rural and rustic celebration, not unlike this EXPO in Modena or the Venice Biennale, and the presumption is that the maidens will catch him when he falls. If we read this image allegorically, the basic reality is that the figure of the mannequin-as-art is being tossed (up, down, around) by all involved in the celebration, in the games or the spectacles of critique (this one included) and culture.” The author goes on to ask: “In defense of itself, has art, in fact, generated a meta-Spectacle, as it were, to counter the constructions or fabrications of history? In what manner has art formulated or conceptualized itself not so much to protect itself but to elude this fate, its destiny, as a mannequin of history? In the end, is the construction of a meta-Spectacle sufficient to combat the mannequinization of history, whether it is the history of art, critique or culture?”

The catalogue contains 188 color and 38 black and white reproductions, biographies of all the artists, and a checklist of all the works in the show.

Peter Halley: New Paintings – Associations, Proximities, Conversions, Grids is the artist’s first exhibition at Galleria Mazzoli, Modena, November 12, 2016 - January 2017. For this exhibition of twelve new paintings, curated by Richard Milazzo, the curator has prepared a seminal new book, a unique critical document, entitled Skewed: Ruminations on the Writings and Works of Peter Halley.
The author-curator writes: “I have for the past several years been in the process of writing a monograph on Peter Halley’s work. A natural part of this process has been to examine and sometimes question the ideas and principles behind the work, both the paintings and the writings. This is especially important because Halley’s writings became one of the main lynchpins for understanding the art of the 1980s and early 1990s. Some of the ideas expressed in his essays would even forecast developments in art in the twenty-first century. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, Halley produced not only paradigm-shifting paintings, he theorized many of the concepts that went into the making of the art of his generation and beyond, which contributed specifically to the displacement of New-Expressionism in art and the rise of Neo-Conceptual, in general.
“It should be mentioned that the title of this book was inspired, rather ironically, by the only title of Halley’s paintings, Skewed, not included in the subtitle for the show: Peter Halley: New Paintings – Associations, Proximities, Conversions, Grids. In its reference to the title of the painting, it is purely descriptive, given that the paintings themselves are all skewed toward the more Minimal end of Halley’s aesthetic, both in terms of the limited number of colors and the limited number of conduits and cells used in the paintings. However, there is at least one other irony embedded here: instead of writing a catalogue essay about a specific group of paintings, I have chosen to write about writing, Halley’s writings, and, of course, about his art, oddly ‘encouraging’ his essays to proactively skew my text(s), in an attempt to balance somewhat the terms of the ‘exchange’, making whatever is simply discursive here more dialectical.
“Halley’s writings, like his paintings, shined brightly in the 1980s precisely because of their radical and experimental nature, and this cursory (hopefully not too microscopic) re-examination, conducted nearly thirty years later (in the case of certain of these essays), remains in the best spirit of observation and experimentation, a spirit that should animate not only science in general but the arts. If my texts are skewed, they are skewed only by Halley’s writings and paintings, that is, only insofar as they are the content of my observations and ruminations about them. For better and for worse, we are operating here in the dark, in a forest of free-range ideas, where mistakes and missteps (I am sure I am making my share of them) are not encouraged, but nor do they become the reason to suppress speculation, contradiction, unhampered dialogue.”
In addition to the intensive analysis of Peter Halley’s writings (abundantly excerpted in the author’s dialogical text), the book contains 190 color and black and white illustrations, 12 full-color plate reproductions of the artist’s paintings in the show, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, and a complete bibliography.

Ross Bleckner: New Paintings 2017-2018 is the third exhibition of the artist’s work at Galleria Mazzoli, in Modena, from June 16 through September 2018, curated and with a book by Richard Milazzo, The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s.

Functioning as the catalogue for the exhibition of the White Paintings (2012-18) and the most comprehensive presentation of the Blue Monet Paintings (2011-18) in Ross Bleckner: New Paintings, The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s documents for the first time the works the artist produced in the 1970s, and continues where the second volume, The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner, left off, covering the major paintings from 2011 to the present: the Brain Paintings (2012-15), the Black Monet Paintings (2012-17), the Treasury of Light Paintings (2013-14), the Architecture of the Sky (or Dome Paintings) Reprised (2013-16), the provocative Burn Paintings (2015-17), the Bird Paintings Reprised (2016-17), and the Paintings Based on the Photographs by Cy Twombly (2018), exquisite smaller paintings functioning as homages to Twombly’s photographs.

The first volume, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, of this three-part monograph, was published in Brussels in 2007 [see above]; the second, The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner, was also published by Galleria Mazzoli, and it accompanied the second exhibition at the gallery in 2010 [see above]. (The first volume, The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, of this three-part monograph, was published in Brussels in 2007.)

Rather than writing a comprehensive text, the author chose, instead, in the third volume, The Corner of the Room, to conduct a series of conversations with the artist, primarily analyzing the work of the 1970s, but also covering the recent works since 2011, including those being shown in the exhibition, Ross Bleckner: New Paintings, namely the White Paintings and the Blue Monet Paintings. Approaching the work through this more personal approach not only opened “the door to last year,” but also to many years past and to the present. The subjects discussed and the experiences revealed include the relentless desire and futile attempt to achieve the ‘perfect’ surface in abstract painting but being faced with the ultimate asymptotic reality of innumerable thresholds and the contradiction of wanting this same painting to reach beyond itself to the social issues of the larger world. We see the artist trying to come to terms with the “hard nut of who we are,” refusing to deny this reality but also knowing that much of what we accept about any given reality is constructed and therefore possibly subject to transformation. We observe Bleckner develop from the small formal and existential corners of his life and painting in the 1970s, moving away from the prescriptive parameters of Minimalism and Conceptualism toward a post-Constructivist aesthetic and ethos during this period, attempting to generate “structures of emotion” that made him feel and the work seem less “cornered,” leading him ultimately to create his Grid and infamous Op or Stripe paintings of the early 1980s, and still later, his Memorial or AIDS Paintings. It is this disciplined but libidinal trajectory that finally results in the multi-faceted Flower Paintings addressing the more generic human predicament of mortality. Along the way, Bleckner dialogues formally with such artists as Piero della Francesca, Tintoretto, Goya, Manet, Monet, Malevich, Picabia, Nolde, de Kooning, Newman, Cy Twombly, Guston, and Smithson – but sufficiently transmuting these influences, even where he may even be quoting a bouquet of flowers handed to him by Manet on his deathbed or a single waterlily by Monet.

Other topics of discussion are “growing up absurd” on Long Island; going to school at Cal Arts; murder, entropy, the Mudd Club, and the art world in New York City in the 1970s; Buddhism, consciousness raising, and the Forgotten; the Sea and Mirror episode with Alec Baldwin, previously covered primarily by Page Six of the New York Post; putting one’s finger in the fire of the Burn Paintings, oblivion and death edits. And, of course, the incomparable beauty of the Blue Monet Paintings (or what the artist calls his White Paintings). The author/curator writes: “Perhaps it is these appointments of color that not only distinguish the Blue Monet Paintings from their predecessors, the Weather Paintings, but also lend them their exquisite characterology. It is color that is fundamentally imbued with impermanence, with the sensation that it (any one color) may never appear, never resonate, again quite in the same way. We can say this about the forms, as well. Do we not feel exactly the same way about a water lily painting by Monet, with its irrepressible but ungraspable subtleties of form and color? And so, too, do the barely visible, barely sustainable ‘structures of emotion’ in the floating world of the Blue Monet Paintings survive perception. Making each mark, each trace of color, feel all the more precious, all the more irretrievable, all the more indispensable – like the unique life of a person, even though we know that humanity goes on, presumably, and that there is more paint in the tube or in the bowl from whence these forms and colors came.”

The Corner of the Room: Ross Bleckner’s Paintings of the 1970s contains an extensive conversation with the artist over the course of several days, annotated by the author, 480 color and black and white illustrations, 148 color plates of Bleckner’s most seminal works, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, a complete bibliography, and an index of works by the artist.

On the occasion of this museum-worthy exhibition, Walter Robinson: New Paintings and Works on Paper, 2013-2020, with 15 large new paintings, including Robinson’s masterful Grand Guignol of a painting, Pulp Romance, and dramatic images of American hamburgers, beer, cigarettes, lovers, painkillers, dolls, Pinocchio (Mazzoli’s alter ego!), Warholian stacks of money, and even a Massimo Bottura salad, and a Ferrari race car at the head of the pack, Galleria Mazzoli Editore has published the epic monograph A Kiss Before Dying: Walter Robinson – A Painter of Pictures and Arbiter of Critical Pleasures by Richard Milazzo, with an Italian translation by Ginevra Quadrio Curzio. The monograph also contains a catalogue with a checklist and reproductions of the works in the exhibition. It is the first major monograph on this important American artist and critical voice. The book documents fifty years of his work, beginning in the 1970s and during the revolutionary heydays of the East Village, tracking his ubiquitous presence right through millennium and continuing to this day.

Both as the curator of the exhibition and the author of this major monograph on the artist, A Kiss Before Dying, Milazzo writes: “I have tried to write a book that would give a comprehensive picture of this major but under-appreciated and quintessential American artist who has functioned both as a painter and a critic (in the tradition of Fairfield Porter, but with a bite as big as his bark). Robinson, in his capacity of artist-as-critic, was one of the earliest and most seminal exponents of Picture Theory art, invested in the postmodern critique of representation, and yet who decided to paint rather than employ photography as his primary medium, even where many of his ‘paintings-as-pictures’ are based on photography and drawn from various photographic sources such as the covers of cheap romance and detective novels and the onslaught of images generated by the advertising industry. Even where, as a part of his working process, he projects a photographic image onto the canvas, this does not prevent him from executing the image in a most sensuous and painterly manner. Few others have used painting as Robinson has, to critique the Spectacle of the photo-based world of images, but not without reasserting the values of sincerity of aesthetical purpose in a cynical culture, even bringing romance (impassioned emotion) to the table, no matter how sinister or lovingly portrayed.

“The fact that this critic-as-artist has also conducted a major career as a writer is extraordinary. Besides founding Art-Rite magazine with Edit DeAk and working for Art in America during its heyday, Robinson was a critical gadfly in the East Village during the 1980s, writing about its colorful characters and street life, and constructing by default a history of the scene there and in the Lower East Side of New York City. While these sectors of the City (and the South Bronx) were in severe social disarray, tragically afflicted by homelessness and AIDS, the period between 1982 and 1988 contributed to the paradigmatic reinvention of the art world. Robinson was a seminal part of this reenvisionment (sic), in terms of his painting, writing, and editing, having been the Art Editor of the East Village Eye, a short-lived, rambunctious and outré publication covering the arts in general. But it was for Art in America that he wrote, in collaboration with Carlo McCormick, his most controversial essay, ‘Slouching Toward Avenue D,’ which evoked the treacherous response from one of October magazine’s henchmen, Craig Owens.

“It is for these and many other reasons I felt it was necessary for Robinson, this Janus-configured artist-as-critic and critic-as-artist, to speak in his own voice. Hence, the many citations in the course of this monograph, not only his but others, as well, and the various ‘campaigns’ I have conducted in behalf of other artists, creating hopefully a critical cacophony dominated by no one, especially the author. To advance the cause of this dialectical or dialogical environment, I have employed square brackets to intervene upon texts and expository captions to create autonomous sideshows in this circus or Célinesque Grand Guignol of a monograph, which is hopefully less mono and more multi. It is additionally my hope this new expansive critical methodology – these ubiquitous square brackets and expository captions – will comprise a new more inclusive way of doing art history, advancing, if not revolutionizing, the cause of critique as a source of libidinal pleasure and self-critique. This, in the still greater hope subjectivity and so-called objectivity might play into each other’s hands, like one of the harlequins or clowns in Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques failing sadly to juggle far too many balls.

“By the way, could a title, A Kiss Before Dying, be any more symptomatic or appropriate, if not ironic, during this period of the Great Pandemic of 2020? Although it was not intentional on my part to assign this additional fervid but mournful meaning to these poignant words (stolen by the artist from a movie title no less), I am sure the sincerity of the artist’s work in general, despite the explicit cynicism of his work and habit of mind, and the author’s deciduous role in constructing this self-critical tome, contributed to this massive but subtle ironic deterioration in behalf of this agonizing penultimate fate of a piteous kiss before dying. But, in the end, could we not also say a fearful but fiercely joyous fate?”

In addition to the intensive critical and dialectical analysis of Walter Robinson’s paintings and writings (abundantly excerpted), the 632-page volume contains approximately 950 color and black and white illustrations, 47 full-color plate reproductions of the artist’s paintings and works on paper in the show, a checklist of these works in the exhibition, a comprehensive history of his exhibitions, a selected bibliography, and an index of the works by the artist in the monograph.

On Saturday 19th June, 2021, at 5.30 p.m., Galleria Mazzoli in Modena will have the pleasure of inaugurating a major retrospective exhibition by the Modenese photographer Franco Fontana.

About seventy works by the artist, mostly unpublished, made from 1961 to 2017, will be on display. They will feature some of his most classic subjects: the famous landscapes, characterized by his interest in color and analysis of the geometry of nature, the urban and industrial scenarios of American cities, the seaside resorts with their inevitable tourists, swimming pools, shadows, and asphalt pavements.

An important selection of unpublished Polaroids, made by the artist over the years, will also be presented. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of two major catalogs, one focusing on the production of Fontan’s Polaroids with text by the famous Italian art historian Achille Bonito Oliva, the other on the artist’s photographic production over the course of fifty-six years, from 1961 to 2017, with a text by the American critic and independent scholar Richard Milazzo.

Achille Bonito Oliva, in his text, describes the artist’s poetics as follows: “Fontana’s photography is not casual and instantaneous, not the result of an elementary doubling; it is instead the placement in a pose that complicates the reality from which it stems, making it ambiguous,” while Richard Milazzo points out that calling Franco Fontana’s aesthetic minimalist “is not quite right, given how full of life his images are. It is more like he is making room for us in the space of his vision, or space for us to experience small parts of the world that aspire to more universal values […] One almost gets the sense he would like us to experience the universe in a grain of sand. Silly as that might sound, but I think this is his aspiration. A laudable aspiration, rewarded by its realization.”