Paintings

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EXQUISITE SPELL: THE PAINTING OF ANTHONY GRAVIANO

Anthony Graviano’s paintings appear to fuse an apocalyptic netherworld with a playground or nursery reminiscence out of some ideal childhood. This synthesis of innocence and Armageddon mirrors poet and visual artist William Blake’s joining of contraries in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and like Blake, Graviano eschews satire and glibness in favor of the visionary, offering an artistic encounter that honors the world’s fundamental paradoxes, complexity and fearsomeness, even as these seem to be thrown into starker relief with each passing day.

The dualities Graviano deals with are echoed in his Holy Cave series, paintings in which an elegant topography trod upon by a procession of solemn figures contrasts with the stamped images of molecules that often hover in these works’ foregrounds. The mixture of sweeping vistas, elegantly weathered rocky outcroppings and mottled intrusions of a more biological and/or technical nature (images of synapses, strands of DNA and fantastical figures reminiscent of nanotechnology) corresponds to the work’s diverse palette, which in its turn combines bright hues one might find on a toy with brackish, even bloody passages suggesting the dangerous and stygian. The overall effect adds up to a visual reverence that for its worldly canniness is all the more sincere, an attitude that reflects the mode of perception Blake felt was necessary in this world, one which stakes out a precious (and often precarious) middle-ground between mutually sustaining—and annihilating—contraries.

Graviano’s aesthetic merger of the childlike and the catastrophic is amply suggestive. One stamp appearing in his paintings recalls Darth Vader as well as the riot police and military “special forces” units whose presence in contemporary life looms ever larger, especially in light of social challenges ranging from terrorism (whether state-sponsored or more spontaneous), military conflicts over natural resources, to increasing economic austerity and degradation. In the distinctly antihuman, insectile quality of this figure we are reminded of the underlying accuracy of the depictions of menace in fables, in which threatening characters are paired down to an imagistic essence clarified in conditions of dramatic urgency. In the disconcertingly charming, toy-soldierly quality suggested by the stamps of airplanes dropping bombs we are also reminded of the presence of violence in the imaginative landscape of childhood, as well as of modern warfare’s endemic presence and brutally depersonalizing nature.

Another of the antipodes whose combined tensions charge Graviano’s work is that between the past and what all-but promises to be a radically foreshortened future. A number of paintings feature the twining snakes comprising the ancient symbol for medicine known as the Caduces of Hermes, while other works, especially in more lyric and painterly passages, include various figures of goddesses depicted by ancient peoples. Looking to the divine feminine for hope in the face of cataclysm, or simply the inevitability of death more generally, is as old as humanity itself, and Graviano’s expression of this impulse is appropriately protean and heroic, blending a fauvist authority with a restraint born of the devotional quality expressed in his work. The combined effect is a solemn encounter with our own moment, rather than a naïve attempt to transcend its horrors or to block them out altogether in favor of the strictly conceptual or aesthetic. It’s as though in the artist’s vision images and impulses from humanity’s remote past are feeding into the growing tenuousness of our present, suggesting an unlikely sense of promise, against worsening odds, that’s derived from our having made it this far. The distant past isn’t referenced lightly, but to suggest the intensity of a present which, for all its anxieties, is born of an evolutionary journey of incalculable struggle, passion and majesty, none of which Graviano’s artistic vision, however harrowing, slights. One is reminded of the poignant observation Emily Dickinson made in one of her letters, “life is a spell so exquisite that everything conspires to break it.”

Just as one doesn’t want to give short shrift to the overall innocence his paintings express (reflected by such titles as “Prayers for the Newly Born”), neither can one turn away from the grimness of their apocalyptic intensity. These tendencies fuse most seamlessly in Bug Chaser #5, Graviano’s masterpiece in this style. The work can be experienced at once as a highly affecting evocation of boyhood war fantasy, and of the real nightmare contemporary history implies. From a distance the painting’s individual features seem to merge into larger, quaintly homuncular figures that occupy a scintillating atmosphere comprised of an especially adroit combination of the artist’s stock images, including stamped imprints of weaponry and of the triangular biohazard symbol, as well as of a tricycle.

Graviano’s paintings conjure both the incendiary global political and economic pressures of our day, as well as the child’s eye or Taoist “primal self” required to experience these pressures without succumbing to emotional or artistic defeat. That is, they suggest a sense of wonder capable of enduring despair. There is a sense of searching in the work that borders both anguish and ecstasy, as though the artist were experiencing his antithetical themes—which encompass hope and despondency, wonder and dread, existence and annihilation—as they collide in the dynamic process of finding the formal equilibrium that is finally expressed in his works.

In all this they feel entirely of our moment, beating their way, as each of us must, between the dangers of a certain cultural infantilism on the one hand, and morbid gloom on the other. It is as though the artist walks a tightrope between falling into twin mental traps, seeing each as the flipside of the other, all the while respecting the impetus behind our flimsy mental defenses against a technologically unprecedented carnage threatening to erupt at any moment. Suggesting both this peril and our fragility in light of it, his paintings remind us of all that is at stake in the meanwhile: life in all its magnitude, to which Graviano remains open, refusing to his lasting credit to take any of it for granted.

—Tom Breidenbach
“ Tom Breidenbach is a poet whose writing about art has appeared in ARTFORUM Magazine for the past decade. He lives in Brooklyn.”

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