McKenzie Fine Art: Paul Corio 2020 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467 fax 212 989 5642


	Paul Corio: What Kind of Fool Am I? September 9 - October 25, 2020
	Working abstractly with a vocabulary of simple geometric shapes, the longtime focus of Corio’s work is and has always been the primacy of color, ordered both systematically and randomly in terms of value, hue and saturation. As the artist notes, while still animated by the interrelationship of colors, the new paintings are “…very much engaged with the depiction of light, hazy atmosphere, and the plain illusion of depth in the commonly understood sense—not Clement Greenberg’s optical space, but the ordinary three-dimensional space we all inhabit. I then try to fill that space with things one would not encounter in daily life, including surprising color experiences.” Several of the paintings have an overall compositional structure inspired by a Roman mosaic floor pattern of repeating, obliquely-set squares surrounding a diamond shape, viewed by the artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The square and diamond shapes are organized by color value to create different types of spatial movement within the work. In some paintings, the squares are filled with “hue circles,” in which wedges of color transition from light to dark and back again. This creates a visual shimmer as well as rotational movement; meanwhile, the color in the central diamond transitions from warm to cool as the eye travels up and down, or a single vivid color sets up a strong contrast to the more subtle hues of the squares. In other works, the squares and diamonds are filled with rectangular bands of color, checkerboard fields, or combinations thereof. Spatial logic is disrupted by an off-register outlining of the overall pattern in solid light or dark colors. The disruption is enhanced by slight breaks in the lines where they occasionally fail to meet or reach the canvas edges. In other works, ribbons of color are assembled from adjacent triangles and set against light or dark fields. The ribbons project and recede in space, moving in straight lines, zigzags, and diagonals, advancing rapidly or pulsating slowly across contrasting fields of color, creating dimensional forms in some places while lying flat in others. The rhythmic and syncopated feel in the paintings is not surprising, as Corio is a jazz drummer and in an earlier life performed with New York punk bands. The lively titles of Corio’s paintings reflect his varied interests outside of painting: not only jazz and 70s punk rock but also horse racing, detective fiction, literature, film, and philosophy. Born in Providence, Rhode Island and educated at RISD and Hunter College, Corio has lived in New York for over thirty years, and has been exhibiting his work in gallery and museum shows for the past fifteen years.