Anthony Giannini: Mess Head

Diane Rosenstein Gallery is pleased to present Anthony Giannini: Mess Head, his first solo exhibition with the gallery.  Consisting of new work from his Table Top Still Life and Remnant series, Giannini uses gesture, appropriation, screen-printing, and color theory to create intensely layered paintings. The artist, who lives in Detroit and The Bronx, takes a polyphonic approach in orchestrating imagery surrounding notions of identity, religion, and politics. 

 

Giannini uses a complex improvisational process that includes still lifes, image manipulation software, screen-printing and stenciling; and he moves between both physical and digital modes of production. Interweaving the personal, political, ordinary and the sacred through a rigorous formal complexity, the paintings in Mess Head live between representation and abstraction.

So much crap in my head 
So many rubbishy facts,
So many half-baked
theories and opinions….
So much political swill.
So much crap, Yet
so much I don’t know 
and would dearly like to
I recognize nearly none
of the bird songs of dawn-
All I'm sure of is
the maddening who,
who-who of the doves… (from C.K. Williams, “Doves,” 2003)

 

The paintings in Mess Head are a visual response to the inundation of repetitive imagery and doublespeak in digital culture. His work is an effort to transform these temporary flickers into visual bird songs, to extract a gestural poetry from a rapidly changing environment.  He balances his internal and personal histories with the legacy of his family against the onslaught of dizzying data that arrives with daily life.