MARC FERRARO

Lately I’ve been making paintings by arranging objects on canvas and finding a way to paint them. This came as a result of keeping items from my life as a consumer and artist. An artist consumer. Takeout, online orders, studio clothes that ran their course, and the odd find on the sidewalk. All this stuff gets stowed away in shopping bags, the closet, the studio corner. I keep everything that has an interesting form or material quality. I’ve never seen an undesirable piece of cardboard. Tubes of paint even come in cardboard tubes. Tubes in tubes. Glue the packaging on canvas and paint it with the color that it came with. I remember reading that Blinky Palermo made paint kits for people to paint their own stenciled blue triangles at home. I’m captivated by the gestures made by artists like Palermo. The way he made the seemingly obvious feel so potent and playfully dumb. You almost can’t imagine him painting them. It’s like they are found shapes that he somehow stumbled across.

The items I’ve been using in paintings feel like found shapes. I’ve been wondering how these things can act as stand ins or entry points for the formal abstraction I love so much. All this stuff contains a composition by the fact that some manufacturer or designer made them for another purpose. By including them in a painting I can highlight those formal characteristics and incorporate some of the content of my everyday life into my paintings.

-Marc Ferraro