Blood & Flowers
2022, Sean Horton (Presents), New York, NYSounding like the perfect album title, “Blood & Flowers” is a collection of some of the artist’s favorite refrains: short, accumulated impastos laid upon raw linen, lines of nails or staples edging the supports, and evocative words and phrases that sample deeply internalized texts. Pastel pinks, blues and yellows rest upon glistening rabbit-skin glue and weathered found materials — almost any piece of wood at hand (previously functional or not) is deemed an appropriate support.
Heaven (2022) positions an inverted chair slightly above head height inviting the viewer to gaze upward towards the sky-blue-painted seat. Nearby, Driving and Crying (2017—2022) seats a small painting of a weeping figure in a chair; the scene is equal parts Marian apparition and late night intoxication. Across the room, fiat ars — pereat mundus (2018—2019) couples Walter Benjamin’s dictum “Let art be created, though the world perishes” with a crudely outlined Totenkopf.
In Sunday Painting (2022) the creamy words “Better Days” are written in hesitant, loafing cursive to a slab grey ground. Clusters of sunflower-colored brushstrokes gather along the bottom edge creating a vista that causes the text to recede to the horizon. Like red blood cells into white, a soothing Baker-Miller pink seems to infiltrate the purity of the letters. In Gallo’s hands, cadmium red becomes both material and content; the poppies from his dooryard and the Mystic Lamb’s chalice, American Red Cross and Malevich, or flowers and blood.
INSTALLATION
