Vincent Desiderio is a postmodern realism master painter, art professor, and art critic known for his large-scale allegorical paintings.
There is something about Desiderio’s work that immediately engages you in the story. It’s as if each painting is one frame of a movie, and looking deeply into the work starts the film running in your head. It’s a slightly disorienting feeling, as if you were drugged without knowing it.
Desiderio describes his approach as “trying to create a sense of what it feels like to be at the threshold of dream images coalescing into sequentiality with no loss of their dreaminess, as it were.” The edge of the dream state is a place we are all familiar with.
The work is filled with art historical references, but Desiderio often comments on the emotional states of contemporary society. A recurring theme seems to be the sleep of reason.
Desiderio’s painting Sleep was the inspiration for Kanye West’s Famous video (2016).
The artist lives and works in Sleepy Hollow, New York.
Vincent Desiderio Theseus
Theseus opens at Marlborough Gallery in Midtown, Manhattan with a reception on Tuesday, January 9 from 6 – 8 pm. Through February 3. It is Desiderio’s ninth solo exhibition at Marlborough.
Theseus was the mythical hero king who founded Athens, Greece. He is the clever one who slew the Minotaur in the Labyrinth in Crete. Theseus was known as a unifying leader.
Desiderio has said that he doesn’t try to communicate with the viewer, that his work is simply his own way of processing his thoughts.
Unless you only watch Fox News, it is easy to recognize the tension of current events in the work.
Vincent Desiderio, ‘Wringing,’ 2017, oil on canvas, 80 x 165 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery