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Beyond Post Modernism: Joseph Palermo on the Innovative Frontier
Worlds at War , 2004, oil on canvas ( 10' x 12' ), $100,000 This imposing picture fulfills the new paradigm in a quintessential, spectacular way. Dominating the painting is the life-or-death struggle at its center. The Lone Ranger on his white horse Silver battles hand-to-hand with a mounted, turbaned, grenade-belted, sword-wielding warrior, while both horses are depicted rearing in battle postures of their own. The relationship of these two foreign fighters to world affairs today is obvious, yet the rest of the painting adds dimension to the subject matter which raises it to a level of genuine universality. In the painting's immediate foreground, the blocks of stone fallen to ruin are faced with classical Greek bas-relief friezes of battle scenes taken from the Parthenon and the Great Altar of Pergamum. Upon the red mountain background to this action, where the high slopes seem to hold back a deluge of blood, are the faint tracings of ranks of soldiers from a Roman frieze. Dead-center in the foreground is the image of a wailing woman cradling a dead child in her arms, an image quoted exactly from Picasso's famous anti-war mural inspired by the Nazi air-raids on the Spanish village of Guernnica. Not quite completely buried, within the yellow, Arabian, desert sand in the right foreground, are ghostly figures of the dead. On the far left from the Guernica figures are two contemporary allied soldiers in desert fatigues, one of them kneeling in grief over the other who lies prostrate, mortally wounded. Just beyond them, a discarded combat rifle lies or hovers, the gun upside down yet pointing with menace toward both the Lone Ranger and the frieze tracery of Roman soldiers on the red mountainside. Almost obscured beneath the sand on the left, between the woman-and-child and the two tragic soldiers, is a biomorphic, satanic figure, part serpent, part human or animal, an underground mythical beast, looking very self-satisfied with the surrounding violence and destruction. As if on stage, the entire action scene of this painting is curtain-framed on either side by a leaning Modernist building, with the silhouette of a forked tree limb at the extreme top right, suggesting both nature's neutrality and its regenerative power, as well as representing the Gothic exterior rib-detailing on the top of the few floors of the former World Trade Center's now collapsed twin towers. The central and subsidiary narrative and symbolic actions of the painting are surrounded by plane and solid geometrical forms that help lend the picture a sheer physical power, founded upon extreme compositional solidarity, that is rarely achieved in painting. With its strong, dramatic composition, its wide cultural range of reference and imagery, its varied and versatile command of technique, and the profound intellectual resonance of its composite subject matter, this is a painting of great importance. It is clearly an ad hoc construct assembled in part from identifiable sources, past and present, toward the single purpose of a unique, powerful picture, and in this aim the artist has succeeded quite admirably. The painting deservedly belongs in the company of the most advanced new art of the present day, and the viewer can confidently hope for more work of such stature to issue from the studio of the artist whose imagination and technical skill produced this truly impressive work. Having arrived at the major milestone of his first lifetime retrospective exhibition, Joseph Palermo may nevertheless prove to be an artist whose best work still lies ahead of him, if this particular painting is any indication of what may be expected from him hereafter. by James Mann, Curator-at-Large More About 'Beyond Post-Modernism'
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