黑料不打烊

            HORTON GALLERY | DECEMBER 8, 2011 鈥� JANUARY 14, 2012

Peter Gallo鈥檚 interests are literary as well as painterly, frequently if not always including words or phrases in his eccentric but enjoyable art. With titles like 鈥淚ntifada,鈥� 鈥淏low up the abbatoir,鈥� and 鈥淚鈥檓 Not Dead Yet,鈥� one might think that Gallo has set up a barricade to harangue his audience with a message, but the words seem more surreal than provocative. 鈥淧aint Symptoms鈥� (2011) is a tallish, narrow oil-on-velvet, with blocks of different colors pushing their way into the viewer鈥檚 field of vision. Another oil, on linen backed by found wood, is titled 鈥淪hip of Health鈥� (2011); it consists of a rough sketch of a sailing ship centered within a frame painted on the canvas and a grid of dots. The appeal of Gallo鈥檚 art comes from its rough-and-tumble technique, which tends to emphasize the content of his paintings rather than the technical skills of the hand. In the work named 鈥淔riendship and Modernism鈥� (2011), Gallo includes a rectangle of paint in the middle, framed by thin, broken sticks. This kind of improvisatory, ad hoc creativity often serves to mask poor skills, but in Gallo鈥檚 case, the rawness is a genuine part of his aesthetic, whose ungainliness keeps us thinking.