Paul D'Agostino

"Paul was the first artist whose studio I was told to visit when we were opening Life on Mars. I have felt ever since then that Paul embodies in many ways the heart and soul of the Bushwick scene, but also that he represents a particular kind of artist working today, the kind who also works as a curator, gallerist, writer, and teacher while still maintaining a devoted studio practice. He has been a tireless and generous supporter of the Bushwick community and his fellow artists, and he and I have had a rich dialogue with one another over the years about art, film, and sports, especially basketball—of note is that Scriptive Formalities was almost called Step-Back Three. We at Life on Mars are pleased to celebrate and showcase Paul's latest, complex, brilliant work."

Michael David

Artistic Director/Curator

Life on Mars Gallery

January 15, 2016

Paul D'Agostino's third solo exhibition and his first with Life on Mars Gallery, Scriptive Formalities is a presentation of two diverse yet not at all divergent bodies of the artist's recent works in painting, drawing, and sculpture. All of these modes are bound together by shared origins in matters of language, translation and narrative.

Comprising dozens of variably sized panels and canvases, D'Agostino's Chromatic Alphabet series was born of a simple desire to craft paintings that feature words without appearing to feature any letters at all. The artist began by developing a foundational group of 26 small panels to form a 'standard alphabet' of colorful shapes, wherein each panel's size, composition, and palette were determined according to certain facets of an individual letter's particular manner of pronunciation and vocal function within words. The result is an alphabetic system that not only adds an intriguing dimension to thoughts of language itself, but that is also surprisingly easy to learn. Life on Mars is delighted to showcase all of those foundational pieces in Scriptive Formalities, alongside some much larger canvases and panels that the artist has made since completing the original letters, simplifying some of their formal qualities while extending their alphabetic stretch to include a range of foreign letters featuring diacritical marks. With their rich grounds, embedded colors, formal simplicities, and sometimes playful compositions executed in oil and acrylic, these works register as much as celebrations of painting and color as they do of language, metaphor, translation and writing. On exhibit are pieces with titles like Couleurs, Zeit, Ö/Œ/Ø, Obra and Quadro, all of which are precisely what they are titled, although they do not necessarily call attention to themselves as such.

In the project space are sequential charcoal drawings from D'Agostino's ongoing body of work called Floor Translations. Like the Chromatic Alphabet series, these pieces are also matters of lexical curiosity and particularly sourced inspiration. Life on Mars is proud to showcase five new sequences of these narratively driven, negative-space 'embodied' charcoal renderings. The primary formal elements of these works are derived from suggestive paint splatters discovered on various studio floors. The sequences presented in Scriptive Formalities show how the artist has not only honed more sharply certain formal aspects in this series, but also imbued their very singular narratives with greater metaphorical grist. In stories such as The Attenuating Snowman, The Brobdingnagian Pentapede, and Lady Skyecharmer of the Isle, these works are at once sequences of painstakingly executed drawings and original, handwritten manuscripts of tales that are touching, humorous and bizarre. To further 'translate' and memorialize the previously 'meaningless' floor splatters, D'Agostino carries these sequences into a third dimension with mixed-media metal sculptures. On the occasion of this exhibition, Life on Mars has published Lady Skyecharmer & Friends, a limited-edition book gathering all five of these new Floor Translations into one volume.

Life on Mars Gallery 2016