Guzzo Pinc at Tory Folliard

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Listening to Guzzo Pinc’s artist talk a few weeks ago at Tory Folliard Gallery was nearly as refreshing as seeing his brilliant new body of work on the wall. The paintings in his new show “Nomos” (up through Feb. 25) continues his exploration in idiosyncratic abstraction, luscious color, and chewy surfaces where his last exhibition left at the gallery left off. His conversation with Jeff Townsend dove into the interests that inform his work in a way that brought the whole delicious show into higher and more significant relief. Their conversation was one of the more honest, expansive, personal, and illuminating discussions of an artist’s work I’ve ever witnessed. And still, somehow, I felt a little naughty for enjoying it all.  

“Naughty” because for so many years the art writing world has been allergic to psychobiographical perspectives on artwork. Yeah, sure, there’s no outright prohibition on discussing personality, but the restriction is there, in the same way that knowing you can’t drop F-bombs at your aunt’s dinner table is there. You just know. These pressures are no doubt a lingering hangover from the chauvinism of the New York School so many years ago, and probably from the subsequent desire by the art-industrial-complex to control narratives in order to have the final say on what makes art-work meaningful. But even as I felt a little indulgent devouring Pinc’s personal story, I felt a righteous thaw. 

Since the days when hagiographic profiles of Pollock and Warhol planted icons in our collective minds, we’ve progressed through a chain of personality-averse points-of-view from conceptual work in the ‘70s to NFT’s and virtual reality at the moment. Even identity-based and political art is rarely about personality, but rather a general stance on social issues. I realize this a bold and probably counterintuitive claim but ask yourself how many artists you could identify in a lineup. Exactly. It’s a design based on a legitimate fear that if art ever adopted, say, Bravo’s strategy for creating individual profiles, it could jeopardize the entire enterprise.

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A Little Humanity

This is totally understandable; however, a legitimate backstory isn’t the same as a dirty laundry or fetishization. In the face of Tic Tok-ey opportunism and algorithmic cleverness, a little real humanity can go a long way. While Guzzo Pinc was proffering real, gooey background about his work, I considered that the last best chance we have to preserve authenticity and integrity might lie in all those idiosyncratic particulars of the artist himself–the stuff that has been seen as extraneous and superfluous to the work for so long..the odd personal baggage that in fact drives all artists to make the strange things they do.

That’s a lot to say en-route to addressing the actual paintings in “Nomos,” which are wonderful, but I think the detour is worthwhile. The show itself sings with human touch and material presence. Pinc’s direct and slightly skewed arrays of vegetal, graphic brushstrokes do a brutally elegant tapdance on top of his gritty burlap surfaces. Pitted, tropical flourishes of considered painterly immediacy. Each is a deftly strained relationship, abidingly delicate and ferally rough at the same time. His color palette flirts with good taste but with just enough bile and chromatic dissonance to subvert any kind of scheme. The paintings are truly weird. They’re sexy and elegant too, but weird…shimmying along the edge of a several different compositional razorblades in a way only a broken human imagination could manage. There’s no algorithm or imposter that can synthesize their hiccuppy symbolic strangeness, but even if something happened to get close, there’s surely no way to replicate his perfectly broken human sensibility. Don’t worry if you didn’t have a chance to hear how his music, his home, or his history informed those decisions, trust me that they only confirm the obvious impact of the work…and maybe offer one final safety valve between the human searcher and the inhuman search engine. The paintings are worthy of your authentic human eyes.