Joseph Palermo, Gallery Director
Four Decades of Art ARTV Artist of the Year, 2005 Joseph Palermo’s art of four decades runs a gamut of engagement with most of the deconstructive, formal, and stylistic innovations of the twentieth century. At a minimum, work exemplifying all of the following Modern movements are present within his overall oeuvre: Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Action Painting, geometric abstraction. Conceptualism has a bearing upon his works of calligraphic scribble on transparent plastic film, and Mimimalism bears upon his stainless steel sculptures. On the other hand, scattered throughout his career, figuration in varying degrees of finish, and/or in combination with abstraction, continually reappears, just as it did in the course of the twentieth century at pivotal times of reappraisal or temporary exhaustion of the reductive Modernist direction. A crucial quality of Palermo’s artistic wanderings through Modernism’s newfound lands is that he took up the various modes listed above only as it suited him at a given time, not in any orderly observance of their chronological evolution and priority. In figuration, his expansive technical facility and stylistic range are completely thorough; in the deconsonstructive modes, his familiarity with and use of their innovations is clear and equally thorough. These wanderings were evident in a recent retrospective show of his works at the Las Vegas Art Museum and some of his recent releases . In his most recent major work(Worlds at War, 2004), he has brought his achievement to what the present curator defines as the innovative and intellectual frontier of contemporary art. However, since there is little agreement in the current critical climate about the nature of that frontier, an exposition of its developement and cultural context is helpful in order to fully clarify the import and stature of Palermo's achievement.
by James Mann, Curator-at-Large
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