Long Series #1429.

#1429

Have you met…Vince Contarino?

#17, 2013, acrylic on paper, 4” x 6”

An introduction can be a wonderful thing. You can meet interesting people, and make new friends. You can be introduced to your new favorite foods, books, music, or artist.

I’d like to introduce you to some of my favorite artists. Some of whom I’ve been familiar with for years, and others I’ve only recently been introduced to.

The person I’d like to introduce is the artist Vince Contarino.

Vince Contarino, Little Resistance, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 20” x 18”

b. 1975 in Woodbury, NJ
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Education

1997 BFA Ringling College of Art and Design, Sarasota, FL

Vince Contarino, NT/NF/4, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 17” x 14”

“Slowly we take in the paintings of Vince Contarino. We can see what they are, but can we know how they got that way? Clearly we sense they have undergone a deliberate series of procedures, compositional risks, disruptive incursions, and declarative actions, but we cannot read backwards to a blank canvas, nor know each step. The full story is only what remains on the surface: that which is legible, opaque, cool or confounding.

We study the space in Contarino’s paintings, able to see a few layers or degrees down into their histories, but then it stops. The permeability stops, that is. We perceive each work’s carefully considered collisions, its graphic overlaps, its bravado and cheek. We begin to appreciate a range of co-existing devices that are at the service of a sensibility extremely aware of incidental registrations of meaning, of accidental beauties, of pictorial assertion.”

– Excerpt from Geoffrey Young’s catalog essay for the “New. New York” exhibition at the Essl Museum, Vienna, 2012.

 

Vince Contarino, Untitled (7), 2012, acrylic on paper, 8.5” x 7

Other material relating to Vince Contarino.

Artist website: vincecontarino.com

New Americans Paintings: Vince Contarino

Gorky’s Granddaughter: Vince Contarino

Super Twelve: Vince Contarino

ARTCARDS Review: Vince Contarino

Escape Into Life: Vince Contarino

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