New York-based artist Joseph Giannasio scraps, peels and folds paint, wood and other banal building material taken from exhibition space floors. The rows of tightly bound rolls form single installations that are intended to represent the time he invested in their creation. Giannasio's physical process makes one think of the muscular exertions of the trio of workers stripping varnish off Courbet's Paris apartment floor in his 1875 piece, 'The Floor Scrapers'. But conceptually his work is closer to 1970s installation artists Gordon Matta Clark and Eva Hesse. Like them, Giannasio's intimate, artistic use of urban materials intended for practical purposes creates disarmingly poetic connections between the arbitrary beauty of nature and the aesthetic brutality of the materials used to construct our urban environments. The resulting forms simultaneously evoke tumbleweeds and the rolls of insulation used as building materials in architectural construction. As his materials crumble and corrode, it becomes increasingly difficult to divide the organic and artificial associations his art brings to mind. Giannasio's surface scrapings dig deep.
Ana Finel Honigman
ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a critic and PhD candidate in art history at Oxford University, and a senior correspondent for Your Gallery magazine.
To find out more about Joseph Giannasio's work click here to visit his Your gallery homepage.
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