Artists & Works

Joseph Piccillo
American (b. 1941)
EDGE EVENT XVIII (1981)
graphite on canvas
60" x 72"

STYLE: Neo-expressionism

Although artists often claim a deeper meaning for their imagery than its visual characteristics alone, Joseph Piccillo insists upon this more emphatically than most. "My work has nothing to do with art," he says. The horses in Edge Event XVIII are drawn on a large scale, selectively and mysteriously framed. They are disturbing images. They rear aggressively against the canvas, but are ruthlessly chopped off at various points. Their bodies seem deliberately ghostly against Piccillo's frequently used device of a black background. Although the central divider separates them, the fact that they face in opposite directions suggest a common source—as if they are two different aspects of the same figure. The grace and violence of this work keeps the viewer gazing. Although the horses are ominous on one hand, their beauty is equally compelling.

Joseph Piccillo has been exhibiting his work for thirty years in New York, across the United States, and throughout Europe. His work can be found in numerous public and private collections such as IBM, Microsoft, Time, Inc., Dow-Jones, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Piccillo lives, paints, and teaches in Buffalo, N.Y.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Linda Cathcart, Joseph Piccillo: The Birth of an Image, Burchfield-Penney Art Center exhibition, 12/87
"Piccillo's paintings and works on paper, from the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s, come from the realm of figuration. His intent lies somewhere between Andy Warhol's stark, isolated images juxtaposed against single violent background colors, and paintings by artists like Robert Longo, whose works have an edge of emotion which provides a delicate shift from the possibly pedantic narrative interest in figuration, towards an irony and grittiness which reinforce their emotional purpose...His ambition is to create pictures in which the human or animal image is presented in mythic proportions. Piccillo likes to think of himself as a commentator on our times—an intellectual cynic in a society which makes "heroes and heroines of Oliver North and Vanna White," as Piccillo puts it. However, he is also reluctant to preach, so what is important to Piccillo's work is his desire to capture in impact the heroic figure...—in a stark style both spare and baroque—he renders, on canvas or paper, juxtaposed anonymous images (landscapes, figures, heads, horses) which when taken together posit the absurd with the sublime. These pictures are not earthbound; ordinary characters do not people them...Piccillo is not a "realist" painter—none are there to remind us that they exist in the real world; nor is he a pop artist...Piccillo says he does not want to inflict his aesthetic on the viewer, but instead chooses his subjects because they are "risky" to make and push his abilities. His compositions are determined by his desire to work dissonance against simplicity...The paintings can be similar or can contain multiple but isolated figures—divorced by each other by a strict unseen grid...In some of his pictures Piccillo overlays the images with a geometry of lines and small colored shapes...This system of lines and shapes is not related to the original or "underneath" grid...Piccillo uses this device in two ways. One, as a sort of blackboard of his own personal making, or secondly, as a perverse disruption of what might otherwise be a too perfect picture...The meticulous draftsmanship and the stark images whose shadows blend with a background black as a void are breathtaking...Despite the separate images, the picture is never static...For example in Edge Event XVII, 1981, two horses separated on the canvas by a central bar are seen in part and in opposition. One turns right, the other left. It appears as though their forebodies were born from a single explosion beyond the viewer's vantage point...

For the viewers the first concern is not now Piccillo's technique, but rather the pathos, the silent violence and beauty of the figures. They are mean and women—animals engaged in silent battle, each in a struggle for its own beauty...artists from Leonardo to Gericault, Degas and Delacroix, depicted horses as well as humans because 'either the grace or the violence of these animals so many times changed the course of human history. The horse as supreme beast as well as mythological and historical symbol can come, in Piccillo's work, to be a "kaleidoscope" of expressions: terrorized, sexual, aggressive, docile, suffering.'[Charlotta Kotik]" Reagan Upshaw, Art in America, 2/81 "One is first struck by the rampant romanticism of the subject: giant white horses, like something out of Delecroix or Gericault, rear or roll within the cramped confines of the pictures' space....There is a suggestion of the horses as actors in a story going on outside the limits of the frame, but we are nowhere told what the story is. These drawings, whether on canvas or on paper, evince the draftsmanship which first brought Picillo to attention. The horses are rendered in an anatomically precise manner, but, as in Chuck Close's work, the scale nullifies the illusionism."